It was barely noon when I began receiving panicked phone calls from friends.“I didn’t get tickets” most of them said. “What do I do?”

I guess this comes with the territory when you used to work at the Penn State athletics ticket office. But even I was unable to anticipate what turned out to be the fastest selling ticket in Penn State’s glorious football history.

The 21,520 student season ticket packages sold out in 59 minutes. Now read that again, 59 minutes as in less than a full hour. At $190 a package, Penn State reaped in $4,088,800 in an hour.

Now everyone at the Penn State athletics office anticipated a heavier demand considering 21,000 student season tickets sold out in 13 days the year before. But an hour!? That’s putting it mildly. Apparently so many students logged onto Ticketmaster at 9:00 am (when the sale officially started), that students who logged in at 9:05 were so far back in queue, they never even got a chance to sniff the season tickets.

So with the Blue/White game set for next weekend and the summer looming in the distance, debate has once again begun on student ticket policies when so many students were locked out of last year’s football season.

Currently all Penn State students registered with 12 credits for the Fall (2008) are in the system and eligible for student season tickets. Tickets are distributed on a first come, first place process. Therefore whether or not all those eligible will even get them before they are sold out is highly debatable. Hence why there is a sudden animosity among University Park students towards those enrolled at satellite campuses around the state who are also eligible for tickets as long as they are registered with the adequate credits for next fall.

PLAN A

So the debate rages on, some suggest that seniors should receive priority when buying tickets possibly through a ‘credit-based’ system the scheduling system is currently based on. Seniors with more credits already under their belts are allowed an early head start in purchasing tickets, then the juniors, then sophomores and so forth.

This not only eliminates the possibility of a satellite campus prejudice, but would seem most favorable to a majority of students especially seniors who will be given a greater chance to enjoy the student section in their final year.

PLAN B

Others claim we should reduce the eligibility of satellite campus students. University Park students should be given first priority in ticket sales, and those enrolled at satellite campuses will get the remaining tickets that go unsold in the initial sale.

This is a much more drastic and absurd change. While it is understandable that common perception remains that satellite campus students buy season tickets simply to resell them for profit, it is not always true. During my matriculation at Penn State, my first two years were spent at a satellite campus. The furthest one in fact, Penn State Behrend in Erie, PA. Not only did I continue to buy season tickets (during the 2 dismal Zack Mills era mind you), but I made the 4 hour drive down every football Saturday whether it be the night before or the early morning of, but I was always there in my seat for home games.

PLAN C

Plan C might as well be chucked out the window from the start. Plan C simply calls for an expansion of the student section. This is simply not feasible to both the administration as well as the athletics department. Penn State athletics is a self-sustaining entity, one of the very few among universities in the United States. That means, teams from men’s badminton to women’s rugby depends on the revenue generated from the football program.

And at $190, students pay the least per game at $23.75. Any expansion of the student section would mean seats currently going for twice that are being eliminated for discounted student rates, an overall loss of valuable revenue for the university. Even I know that is not a fair request to a university who currently offers the second largest amount of tickets to students in the nation. The only student section larger than the 21,250 Penn State student section is Texas A&M. So either students are willing to fork over more for a season ticket, or we accept the fact that 21,250 of us in the stadium is in fact a favor granted to us by the university.

(image courtesy of Andrew Pajak of the Collegian)

Penn State football has never been more popular especially among students. It is ‘the’ event week in, week out of the fall semester even when it is against Florida International. Kirk Herbstreit was not lying when he called the Penn State student section the ‘best in the nation’ in 2005. White Outs, Zombie Nation, free shakers, standing next to your drunken and passionate peers all game long, roaring at the top of your lungs until you lose your voice, the student section is unmatched anywhere else in the stadium.

But with the debate heating up in State College now, theres no doubt a change will be made to the ticket sale process. No matter which change is made, entrepreneurial students will find a way to scalp these hot selling commodities for outrageous prices. But I like the sound of giving seniors first dibs at season tickets. Not only is scheduling already done using this process, credits earned is a practical and fair way to distribute tickets without too much of an uproar from the student body. Freshmen and sophomores might complain about being left out in the first two years, but with this policy, they will earn their right to buy tickets when they become an upperclassman. By the time the freshman and sophomores that are left without tickets reach their junior and senior years, they are almost guaranteed tickets under this system as opposed to the possibility of being locked out all 4 years of their collegiate careers.

So the debate will not die out, not until everyone who wants a ticket is able to buy one at face value. But there are clearly better ways of ticket distribution than the policy in place now. What would you suggest?

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