Paying for tickets, assigned seats still possible, among proposed fixes
Saturday marked the first full home season for USC’s new student ticketing system, but Anna Edwards still has her issues with it.
While the director of student services thinks Ticketmaster is doing fine, she instead has questions about USC’s culture and why so many students leave football games early — or fail to come at all.
Student Ticketing has 12,000 seats in all to divvy up, and over the course of this year’s home schedule, students only claimed all of them for one game — Georgia.
Since then, the number of ticket requests and students scanning in have tapered off as the number of no-shows has risen, according to data provided by Adrienne White, the Student Ticketing coordinator.
The number of ticket requests was more than 10,000 for each of the first four games, according to the data, but failed to break 9,000 after Georgia, and the number of no-shows has grown from 372 against Missouri — the first game for which numbers are available — to 1,615 against Wofford.
That’s a late-season trend that happens year after year, Edwards said.
“We start strong, but we just drop, regardless of who we play for this last game, even Clemson,” she said.
Edwards and White aren’t quite sure what to do about it, but they’re still considering a number of possible changes:
– Giving up a chunk of students’ 12,000-ticket allocation, so Athletics can sell them
– Going back to a game-by-game lottery
– Getting rid of upper-deck student seating
– Having students scan on their way out
– Changing when students apply for their season passes to later in the summer
And they’re still looking into a pair of ideas that have been pitched to students before: charging for student tickets and assigning seats, which Edwards and White said are common practice among schools in the Southeastern Conference that could help keep students in the stands.
Those proposals will be included in a survey the office will conduct in January, Edwards said, and they’ll be discussed further at a series of focus groups in February.
It’s an effort to bring students’ voices into the process, especially as they consider proposals that haven’t always been received warmly.
“There are going to be cons to everything,” Edwards said, adding that the office wants to get “at least enough information out there so that students feel that their voice was heard (and) that students feel that we all truly evaluated the options.”
By the time spring break rolls around, Student Ticketing will have a better idea for what the system will look like next semester, Edwards said.
For now, the discussions surrounding next season are mostly questions.
They aren’t sure why the percentage of students ejected has fallen this season — only seven students were ejected at the game against Wofford and four for Arkansas, down from 53 against Georgia, according to White — while the percentage of fans overall who were ejected has grown.
And they don’t know why students’ attendance falls in the latter half of the season or why students keep leaving at halftime, a trend that elicited a plea to students from coach Steve Spurrier last week, asking them to stay for the alma mater after the game.
They also want to know if those trends, especially the late-season slump, are normal, so they’ll start collecting data from other SEC schools.
But regardless of the solutions they settle on, Edwards said they’d be challenged with creating an atmosphere inside Williams-Brice Stadium that’s as exciting as the tailgating outside, issues USC doesn’t have with basketball and baseball games in the winter and spring.
“I think what we’ve created with football environment is a culture of tailgating, and not a culture of necessarily cheering on the team and engaging in that spirit and what’s going on inside,” Edwards said.
At least, White added, not for long.
“They are for a moment, and then it’s like, ‘I’m tired of it, and I’m going back to my social life,’” White said.