Season tickets scrapped after one year
Student ticketing will return to a weekly system this football season just a year after USC made the switch to season tickets for students, according to a release from Director of Student Ticketing Adrienne White.
Students will request tickets for each individual game instead of being granted lower or upper deck season tickets, as they were in the 2012-2013 season.
The request period will begin at 9 a.m. a week before each game and end at 5 p.m. the following day. Students will be notified via email whether they received a ticket and have two days to claim it. If more students request tickets than there are tickets available, seats will be awarded in “point order,” meaning those with the most loyalty points and upperclassmen will get priority.
If any tickets are unclaimed, there will be an on-demand period before each game lasting less than 24 hours. It will begin at 5:30 p.m. two days before each game and end at 4 p.m. the day before the game.
This system is very similar to the one that USC used through the 2011-2012 football season. Frenzied students would slouch over their laptops every Tuesday at midnight and frantically try to request tickets on a website that frequently crashed due to the volume of students trying to use it.
After a barrage of complaints during and after the 2011-2012 season, the Office of Student Ticketing switched from TicketReturn, which hosted the old system, to Ticketmaster, which is currently used for all student tickets.
Students requested season tickets in April 2012 for the following football season. Ninety-three percent of requests were granted, giving 9,150 students season tickets in the lower deck and 2,850 in the upper.
Many of those who did not receive season tickets were displeased with the system, and some even resorted to offering to pay big bucks to use a season ticket holder’s CarolinaCard for the day for high-demand games, like the Gamecocks’ October matchup against Georgia.
White and Director of Student Services Anna Edwards suggested coming changes after this year’s football season ended with a rise in no-shows and a decline in tickets claimed for late-season games. A return to the weekly system was one of the initial suggestions they made.