Column: Men's basketball ticketing system needs reform
Published Feb. 12, 2010
Nine thousand is the number of students who could have purchased basketball tickets through the Student Season Ticket Combo that they'll never see.
The ticket combo sounds reasonable enough the first time.
The two sports at MU that charge for student admission are football and men's basketball, so paying for season tickets to both at the same time is convenient and easy.
But the discrepancy between the sizes of the student sections at Memorial Stadium and Mizzou Arena are too large to overcome.
According to the MU athletics department Web site, there are 13,000 available student seats at football games. According to e-mails sent to season ticket holders under the policy, there are 4,000 total student seats available for basketball games.
Clearly, someone's not going to get tickets, though the amount paid is more than the amount for season tickets for football alone.
The difference is undoubtedly accounted for by the chance to acquire football tickets. But with such a large difference, the chance doesn't account for much.
I'm not saying there are 14,000 SSTC holders.
Under the system, there is a potential for there to be 14,000 holders, and therefore 9,000 students lost in the mix.
I also don't expect all students in the SSTC to be actively pursuing tickets to all basketball games, especially non-conference games.
But when it comes to conference games, most notably the rivalry game against Kansas, the fact there is more demand than supply becomes apparent.
When the main group of conference tickets sold out in just more than a day and the Kansas tickets within six hours, the accessibility of "first come, first serve" on a Monday morning with classes comes into question.
Along with the ethics of overselling tickets, there is also the nature by which tickets are transferred among students for games where all the tickets have been picked up.
Some students sell merely out of not being able to attend, stemming from the way in which the tickets are picked up.
The sets of tickets include both weekday and weekend tickets, and the package with the winter break tickets also included two conference games after break, so if students wished to attend those games, they had to pick up a packet of tickets which they might not be able to attend.
Others pick up tickets they have no desire of going to and reselling them to people who were unable to make it to the ticket office before the tickets ran out. The profits students are able to make are extraordinary, such as the $60 I paid for five tickets when I missed the post-winter break ticket package by a day.
In my opinion, selling the basketball tickets separately from football, possibly not even in a season-ticket format, is the most logical course of action for the ticket office. This would avoid the number of overlooked tickets and the high price of reselling tickets between students.
Whatever the methods taken, it's clear the ticketing process needs reform.