In order to eliminate lengthy weekday lines, the University of Wisconsin Athletics Department announced Friday it is drastically changing traditional football ticket protocol and allowing students to vote how they want tickets to be distributed.
The UW Athletic department will e-mail online surveys to last season’s football ticket holders Tuesday offering students to vote for two options for ticket distribution.
One plan would follow the same form as basketball tickets. Students would receive season football tickets prior to the first day of class and then be asked to wait in line once to receive the same seat location for the entire season. Those wishing to be seated in groups would be able to have one student wait in line for groups with a maximum size of 11 students.
The second would provide seating flexibility by affording each student a voucher to be presented at Camp Randall Stadium gates on game day. Students would wait in line at the gate at which they wish to be seated and receive tickets one by one. According to the second plan, or “plan B,” if students want to be seated in groups for games, they must wait in line with their entire group the day of the game. The Athletics Department believes this option would help bring students to games earlier and provide a more fair method of ticket distribution.
UW Deputy Athletic Director Jamie Pollard said students camping out for football tickets has become a “monster problem,” causing some to miss class and also allowing undergraduates to use the current method of distribution to scalp tickets for their own financial benefit.
“We don’t mind [students] camping out — the reality of it is that it’s part of the student experience,” Pollard said. “But there are other students now that have to miss a lot of class time … a bigger issue that has surfaced is that there are students that are using the way that [football tickets] are distributed entrepreneurially, at the expense of other students.”
Pollard added as the weather gets bad, students go against campus policy and bring blankets and other items to camp out with.
The Athletics Department collaborated with the Associated Students of Madison to derive the two options, putting student representation into the decision-making process.
Pollard said the Athletics Department started talking to ASM last fall about some of the concerns of the UW Police Department and the chancellor’s office.
“[We] got to a spot where we thought we would survey the students about giving them the solutions and then letting them decide,” Pollard said.
ASM and UW Athletics Department officials referred to other Big Ten schools such as Michigan State University and Pennsylvania State University, who use similar methods to control ticket policy issues.
UW sophomore Andriy Pazuniak attended a Penn State football game last year and said he believes their program of individual student ticket allocation on game day is both effective and fair.
“It rewards kids who show up on time and also prevents fights over seats,” Pazuniak said. “People who are pre-gaming throughout the entire first half often show up into third quarter and try to take seats from kids who were there the entire game. [The second option] saves that because you get the seats you deserve for showing up on time.”
He added if students want to tailgate and party prior to the game, then they have to be willing to sit in worse seats, which according to Pazuniak, is fair.
The UW Athletic Department will also be e-mailing surveys Tuesday to all of this academic year’s season basketball ticket applicants to decide whether to continue with the current lottery or provide partial season tickets to all applicants.
