Opinion: Letter

Herald needs reality check

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I was surprised to see that you chose to publish Keith Glaser’s letter (“Get to the games on time”) in Monday’s Badger Herald.  While I absolutely agree with the premise that students should arrive on time for games, I was incredibly surprised that the Herald apparently did no research at all on what occurred at the Marshall game before publishing more “bash the student section letters”. 

Despite being inside of Camp Randall stadium more than 20 minutes before kickoff was scheduled to start, I was not allowed to actually observe the kickoff. Instead I, along with thousands of others, was crammed in the hallway while each student was individually assigned a seat by Camp Randall security. A police officer actually grabbed each student’s waist from behind and yelled out a number. Besides the basic point that assigning seats runs utterly contrary to the idea of wristbands rather than tickets, there wasn’t even close to enough staff to seat all the students who wanted to get into the game. If you noticed, the only sections that were even open at the start were P and O, because when you have to have someone give thousands of students individual seats, it takes a lot of time. Why did we get rid of tickets again? One of the officers commented to me that she thought that this policy was as stupid as we did.

Additionally, the hallways were so packed full that many people became separated from the people they arrived with and multiple people told me they had to stay where the security had placed them even though their friends were seated a row or two away. I saw some friends four or five rows up, but we were not allowed to sit together despite there being about seven empty rows of bleachers between us.   

I would strongly encourage The Badger Herald to look deeper next time rather than falling into the trap of assuming laziness and drunkenness on the part of the student section.   I’m not sure how full the student section would have been at kickoff had the UW better thought out this seating policy, but I do know that thousands of students were pretty upset standing smashed together in the foyers while the game was getting well underway.  Hopefully this policy will be rethought, otherwise students better plan on arriving an hour early or more.  How crowded is the rest of the stadium then?

David Mark

UW Alum, 08’

ldavidjm@gmail.com