Change made after students experienced issues with tickets
Student ticketing requests will return to a weekly system this football season, just a year after USC made the switch to season tickets for students.
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. The initial request period is for lower deck tickets only. 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 will get priority. In previous years, loyalty points represented entries into a lottery for tickets.
The system for awarding loyalty points has not changed; 10 percent of each student’s yearly loyalty points roll over to the next year and are added to seniority points.
If any tickets are unclaimed after the initial request period, there will be an on-demand period, which will include upper deck seats, 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.
If there are still unclaimed tickets by 4 p.m. the day before the game, a limited number may be available at the stadium, White said.
Students were sent an email detailing the changes in late April and will request tickets for the game against North Carolina starting Aug. 22. The email included a schedule that detailed the dates for each game’s request, claim and on-demand periods.
White said she and Director of Student Services Anna Edwards held webinars, which almost all filled up, at least twice a month during summer orientation to explain the system to incoming students.
The Student Ticketing Office will soon offer loyalty points for additional sporting and campus events, Edwards said.
Attending “cultural events” and nonrevenue sports like soccer may soon be a way for students to get extra points and increase their chances of getting football tickets.
The new ticket request system is very similar to the one USC used through the 2011-2012 football season.
After a barrage of complaints during and after the 2011-2012 season, Student Ticketing switched from TicketReturn, which hosted the old system, to Ticketmaster, which is currently used for all student tickets. Ticketmaster will still be used this coming football season.
White said that after multiple town hall-style forums with students, meetings with student leaders and other student input, she heard an overwhelming call for a return to the weekly system, which she said is perceived as more fair.
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 deck.
White and 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.
Edwards said another highly suggested option was to charge for tickets. USC is one of two schools, and the only public institution, in the Southeastern Conference that does not charge for football tickets. The other, Vanderbilt University, is private.
Edwards said she sees charging for tickets as a future possibility.
“That’s the way Ticketmaster is designed. We’ve got to recognize if we’re asking it to distribute in a way it’s not designed to, there will be problems,” Edwards said. “We can’t design it to take fake money.”
All three expressed hope that the new system would leave fewer issues for students.
“We can’t please everybody, but we do look at it every year and we try to get opinions for everyone,” White said.