With summer deadline, few students apply for road tickets
USC didn’t have issues with divvying up tickets for away football games this year, but it didn’t have many requests, either.
Everyone who requested a ticket got one, according to Adrienne White, USC’s student ticketing coordinator.
But few students applied for them.
Just 20 students bought tickets through USC for the season opener at Vanderbilt, and only nine asked for a seat at the Kentucky game, according to White. At those games, the university was allotted 4,000 and 2,800 total tickets to distribute, according to Athletics spokesman Steve Fink.
Student Ticketing took requests for away tickets from April 16 to July 2.
At the time, Clemson garnered the most student interest; 166 students got tickets from USC’s pool of 10,000 tickets, which were also sold and taken up by the marching band.
But the Florida game ultimately moved more tickets, as it was boosted by Student Government’s Carolina Convoy.
Out of the 7,000 tickets USC was allotted, 76 students initially requested tickets, but they’ll be joined by 110 more who bought spots on SG’s bus to Gainesville, Fla., for a total of 186, according to White. Convoy tickets sold out around midday Monday.
When Florida played at Williams-Brice Stadium last year, UF got 7,500 tickets and sold 500 of them to its students, according to Steve McClain, UF Athletics spokesman.
The popularity of the Carolina Convoy program marks a distinct challenge for selling away tickets, said Jerry Brewer, the associate vice president for student affairs: It’s hard to tell which games will be worth traveling to.
Few students had the foresight, he said, to know in May that Florida would be such a hot ticket, pitting two top-10 teams in a game that will likely decide the Southeastern Conference’s East Division.
“You have to order away tickets so far in advance, it doesn’t fit into student’s plans,” Brewer said.
Still, other SEC schools, like Georgia and LSU, have sent larger delegations of students to their teams’ away games.
When LSU traveled to Columbia to take on a then-unranked South Carolina team in 2008, it sent 872 students, according to Hunter Geisman, LSU’s assistant manager of ticketing operations.
That number, Geisman noted, is inflated by the 150 or so band members it includes and by a student government-sponsored bus trip. The deadline to apply for a ticket was also in the early summer, on June 12, he said.
Last weekend, the first time the two teams have played since 2008, only 86 USC students went to Baton Rouge, La., with a student ticket for the top-10 matchup, according to White.
And the weekend before, Georgia brought a contingent of 1,000 students to South Carolina, a 10th of the 10,000 tickets the school was allotted for the game, according to Claude Felton, UGA’s Athletics spokesman. Typically, he said, Georgia sells 10 percent of its tickets to students .
Last year, the UGA game became a point of contention for USC students as demand swelled for the game, played in Athens, Ga.; USC had made 150 tickets available to students.
But that sort of discontent is unusual, Brewer said, and this year, angst toward the away-game ticketing system seems to have quelled.
“The Georgia game last year was the only time in my 30 years I’ve ever heard any substantive complaints about away tickets,” Brewer said.
Editor’s note: Editor-in-Chief Colin Campbell contributed reporting.