Ticket Line

[q]Here's the sad truth, in my opinion, and from accounts: the hockey line has turned in face time.[/q]Surest way to get rid of the facetimers is a season like '93...

Yeah, it seems the only way to get a fair ordering of showing up is to start way way way in advance. Find some time, be it 2 weeks, 4 weeks, or May the school year before, when only a few people will show up, and then let the most dedicated fans wait the longest.

Obviously, when the difference between number 1 and not getting tickets is willingness (or, in this case, sheer ability) to wait 3 days and 10 minutes versus 3 days and 20 minutes, then there is no actually ordering within the line, or between line and no line, beyond sheer chance. In order to get the best fans, it would have to be long enough such that people show up slowly and only the most diehard are willing to wait that long, and then people come trickling in later. A-19 nicely explained the downsides of those procedures too though.

The 10 pm to 6 am thing was both a brilliant compromise and a bad idea. I can't blame athletics, you can only blame the administration, who refuses to let the line even begin to interfere with athletics.

I don't know, I really don't know. I just wouldn't be very surprised to be very disappointed with this year's crowd.

If you don't set a start time and let people line up when they want, there won't be any kind of mad rush, or even what you saw with the preline. 200 people won't just decide that "today" is the day to start. If it's a slow trickle of people, they should be able to police themselves. It's in their best interest, and students managed to do that just fine with the original line. When the line is small, you won't need official policing. And athletics can decide when the line is long enough to warrant supervision, but it probably wouldn't happen until the last week or so. And I can think of one student organization *cough* Red Line *cough* that was willing to help out for free. As long as there isn't a mass influx of students in a short period of time, a self-policed list should work fine.

Athletics can not under any circumstances hand out tickets earlier than a pre-defined date. Becuase once they do that, it will undermine the whole process in future years. In fact, the less athletics tries to structure the ticket distribution, the better it will probably run. Set a date, let students do what they want, and perhaps offer official supervision for the last week or 5 days. Bottom line, you can't have any kind of official starting time or everyone will be there.

And for the love of God, make them sleep outside. On concrete and in the rain, if possible. That's the best way to curtail the line.

Unquestionably, the line should be 2-4 weeks long. That will lower the turnout. I would sleep out every night for 4 weeks without hesitation.

I'm not positive if I remember all the details correctly, but I think what Age is suggesting is similar to what was done in the late 80s, pre- Internet and e-mail. I think they just announced (in the Sun and on the radio), more than a week in advance, when tickets would go on sale and that people who wanted to do so could line up around the outside of Lynah. The line was policed, with random line checks, but everyone had to sleep outside, except for the night before tickets were actually sold, when we moved inside Lynah. Upon entry into Lynah, we traded our line ticket for a "class line ticket", meaning that seniors got first priority, then juniors and so on. I'm not sure about grad students or if there was a limit on the number of seats available to each class (although I suppose there must have been some limit).

My recollection was that people slowly started sleeping out during the course of the week and once word got around campus that a substantial number of people were there, then people came en masse. Obviously, freshmen and sophomores had a lot less reason to get there substantially early. As a junior and senior I got good seats in B and slept outside one or two nights, and one night inside. As a sophomore I had decent seats in B, which was the equivalent of D today and as a freshman, good seats in A (but back then C was available to the student).

The Grad line started around 8:45 at the east end of Barton. There were probably 30 people there, heavily policed by Athletics staff ("You step out of line, you're at the end of it - oh, you stepped out." by the time I figured out where the undergrad line was and went sprinting off towards it.
I think there were a lot of people that planned for the line being last night. I was in Barton, and most of my group was somewhere on campus so that when we heard about the line (via cell phone, not email, though there was someone on his computer checking), we could run there and get our line numbers (4 line numbers under 90, plus two more under 200). I think there were a lot of groups doing that, which may/may not mean that the more, if not most, dedicated fans tended to get better line numbers.
As for the line number checks between 10 and 6...it's not a bad idea, but I spent the night catnapping and paranoid that I'd missed a line number check and was going to lose our good seats. There's no order to the numbers, so it's not as if Athletics knows approximately where numbers 125-150 are and can wake up only that group - they wake up everyone. I agree with the line idea posted elsewhere - don't set a starting time and make us wait outside. One possibility is that a tent city grows a la Duke (which doesn't seem too concerned about the conflict with academics), at the same time, fewer people camp out for tickets until just before the sale. It could work, and certainly seems fair.

[Q]I'm not positive if I remember all the details correctly, but I think what Age is suggesting is similar to what was done in the late 80s, pre- Internet and e-mail. I think they just announced (in the Sun and on the radio), more than a week in advance, when tickets would go on sale and that people who wanted to do so could line up around the outside of Lynah. The line was policed, with random line checks, but everyone had to sleep outside[/Q]That's they way it was in the 60's. However there wasn't quite the demand then. At least not untill 66-67.

I thought they didn't offer season tickets to the students in the 60's.

[Q]Jim Hyla Wrote:

I'm not positive if I remember all the details correctly, but I think what Age is suggesting is similar to what was done in the late 80s, pre- Internet and e-mail. I think they just announced (in the Sun and on the radio), more than a week in advance, when tickets would go on sale and that people who wanted to do so could line up around the outside of Lynah. The line was policed, with random line checks, but everyone had to sleep outside[/Q]
That's they way it was in the 60's. However there wasn't quite the demand then. At least not untill 66-67.[/q]
Until at least 65-66, it was first-come first-served admission on a game-by-game basis with students using a CUAA coupon. Got people into the rink plenty early, and a high percentage of 'em were students.

 

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Al DeFlorio '65