93 percent of requests granted for season passes in recent lottery
Second-year biology student Michael Danko was among thousands of USC students awaiting their fate for the 2012-2013 football season. When he found his inbox void of any ticket notifications Thursday morning, he almost thought he had slipped through the lottery system’s cracks.
“I didn’t think I had any tickets, so I was a little disappointed, but as I’m a member of the class of 2016 Facebook group, I saw several people had them in their junk [folder],” Danko said.
He opened his junk files, where most notifications from the ticketing office ended up for thousands of panicked students. Sure enough, there was the congratulatory email. Lower deck seating for the season.
Danko was one of 12,000 students to receive a season pass from the ticketing office Thursday morning and one of 9,150 to receive one for the lower deck student section.
The remaining 2,850 who got season tickets will watch the Gamecock football team from assigned seats in the upper deck. The ticket office made 812 more seats available than in 2011. However, all of the 812 seats were added in the upper deck. And 919 students who had also requested tickets by the July 13 deadline won’t have any guaranteed seating at all this year. Instead, they will vie for leftover “donation” tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.
The new ticketing system is the result of a collaboration among university officials in Student Life and a few student groups, primarily Student Government, after a series of sparsely attended ticket information sessions held in the fall. The new system has replaced TicketReturn with Ticketmaster, already in use at most SEC schools, allowing students to transfer their tickets onto their CarolinaCards.
“We went back and forth for a while, and this is the system we’re comfortable with,” Tracy said. “Just like anything, it’s going to need adjustment time, but I think students will find the system is much more efficient.”
The most significant change in the 2012 football ticket overhaul is the switch from weekly ticket requests to one-time requests for a season pass to all games. A total of 12,919 students entered the lottery through Ticketmaster by July 13. The 12,000 who were awarded a season pass will not have to go online to claim their tickets, which will be finalized once all tuition and university fees are paid. However, they will have to log on each week to transfer their ticket to their Carolina Card. If a student doesn’t plan on using the ticket or fails to transfer their ticket by the Thursday before the game, the ticket will move to a TicketExchange page, where students without season passes can request tickets on demand.
Students who don’t pay their fees by the deadline of August 24 at 5 p.m. will lose their passes, and those tickets will be up for grabs all year.
Those without season passes are questioning the likelihood of getting a ticket on demand each week. Student Body President Kenny Tracy trusts that enough tickets will be dropped to give those students a chance to get into Williams-Brice Stadium.
“There’s going to be quite a few tickets out there for students to get, so there’s still a very real possibility for students without season passes to go to football games,” Tracy said.
Director of Student Ticketing Adrienne White spent most of Thursday and Friday answering questions from students with upper deck seating looking to get into the student section. White told them they are welcome to take a chance by releasing their tickets onto the exchange page and to try to pick up a lower deck ticket, but once their ticket is released they cannot get it back.
White also said that the no-show policy is still in effect, and students with tickets who do not show up to a game will lose their attendance privileges for the rest of the year. However, students will have the opportunity to appeal the following Monday should they miss a game.
White was unavailable to answer students’ questions Monday and Tuesday, as she was on vacation.
Despite assurance that more information will be emailed out in August, many students are already irked by the new system. Ticketing officials say that 10 percent of students’ loyalty points were factored into this summer’s lottery, but third-year business student Steven Noe isn’t sure why he still doesn’t have a season pass when his younger brother, a rising freshman, got a lower-level ticket.
“I have attended almost every football game and many other sporting events, but still did not get season tickets,” Noe said. “I don’t see how they can give incoming freshman these tickets when they have no ‘loyalty points.’ The new system, in my case, is flawed and screwed me over for this coming football season.”
The ticketing office does not yet have a breakdown of tickets awarded by class.
Adam McCutcheon, a rising graduate student in the accounting program who received a bachelor’s degree from the Darla Moore School of Business this May, received no notification at all from the ticketing office even though he has the verification email from the day he requested a pass.
According to McCutcheon, after a slew of redirected phone calls and unreturned emails, he soon discovered that at least 32 other classmates in his graduate program faced the exact same issue. McCutcheon said one of his peers personally visited the Division of Student Affairs and Academic Support to bring attention to the problem but was told by an official that the process for season tickets was “done and over with.” For McCutcheon, who says he has only missed two football games in his entire undergraduate career at USC, it was a disheartening response from the school to which he had been so devoted.
“They’re aware but not willing to do anything about it, which is the worst part,” McCutcheon said. “This is not at all what I was expecting from the university. These aren’t just random students — these are alumni, the people who give back money and resources.”
Director of Student Services Anna Edwards, who took questions about the ticketing system while White was on vacation, said she was not aware of any glitches in the lottery system but acknowledged that the office had received several complaints from graduate students.
“The greatest challenge we have is the complexity of the student information system at USC and determining when a student is considered enrolled,” Edwards said.
When asked if Student Life planned to address any notification issues, she did not give a specific answer, instead referring the Daily Gamecock to an official statement by the ticketing office on July 22. The statement says there will be a ticket information session as a part of Carolina Welcome Week on August 21.