hockey line forming

[Q]cth95 Wrote:

So... mac&cheese, hot dogs, Ramen noodles, pizza... Other than freshmen, how many people do closed dining halls affect?[/q]

I was on the 7/3 for three years, until I moved into an apartment off campus. (We hiked from the Townhouses to Wegmans and back to get groceries for a pasta dinner cooked by a more adventuresome friend.)

Many pro sports team have some system of full and partial season ticket packages. The key to those, however, is the fact that without the partial plan, you won't come close to selling out the place. The teams that sell out their arenas on season tickets alone (e.g. NY Giants, Phila. Eagles) have zero incentive to spend the extra money to create partial plans. Therefore, in the case of Lynah where the demand far exceeds supply, that idea won't help much.

[Q]Jeff Hopkins '82 Wrote:

Many pro sports team have some system of full and partial season ticket packages. The key to those, however, is the fact that without the partial plan, you won't come close to selling out the place. The teams that sell out their arenas on season tickets alone (e.g. NY Giants, Phila. Eagles) have zero incentive to spend the extra money to create partial plans. Therefore, in the case of Lynah where the demand far exceeds supply, that idea won't help much.[/q]

I think this misses the point. Whatever approach is used, I expect multiple ticket packages to sell out and that the differences between what we have now and providing split-season packages would be revenue-neutral. The incentive would be to get more hockey fans into the games and to avoid both the bitterness of those who get frozen out each year and the sorts of potentially dangerous problems we've seen over the past two years. Hopefully athletics would be interested in more than just the easiest way to maximize their bottom line.

[Q]Jerseygirl Wrote:

I just don't understand why no one else seems to think these people trampling each other should be held responsible while they're calling for Athletics to be held responsible. Or if they do think so, why they're not saying it. The setup for this year's ticket distribution didn't encourage calm, compliant behavior, but the students still chose to act the way they did and should be held accountable for that. I am a huge fan of personal responsibility.
[/q]

I agree that the jackasses creating a stampede should be held responsible for their actions. I think the reason you're not seeing people talking about it is because Athletics had it coming.

For 4 (maybe more?) years, Athletics has put together a half-baked ticket distribution procedure that:

1) Makes the ticket line an event
2) REQUIRES everyone to spend a minimum amount of time in the line
3) Sets a specific *start* time for the line

This results in a large number of people, knowing in advance that they will be sacrificing X number of days for tickets, waiting for the official start time. In years past, these people would congregate and form a line - not an effective line, mind you, but something with some semblance of order.

This year, the powers that be made a (thankfully not literally) fatal error - by making the location a secret, Athletics encouraged a stampede. I'd go so far as to say they made a stampede inevitable. Think about it. You have 2000+ people waiting around for an announcement. All of them wish to get the best line number they can (or any line number at all). What do you think will happen when the announcement comes? That all 2000+ people will file towards the location in an orderly fashion?

This does not exonerate the people responsible for doing the actual pushing, shoving, and stampeding. But it does indicate that the Athletics Department has no idea how to run this thing.

But here's the thing - every year or two, some really popular performer comes to Cornell through the Cornell Concert Commission. Every time this happens, they put tickets up on sale, and people wait, sometimes overnight, outside of the Willard Straight ticket office. These people do this without fanfare or (much) press coverage. They do this without line numbers. They do this with no hope of the performer showing up to thank them for being such huge fans. And on the day tickets go on sale, these people walk up and buy their tickets in a more or less orderly fashion (and yes, I realize pushing, shoving, and line cutting is a problem in these lines - but I saw the Jon Stewart line and it wound its way into the Arts Quad with no stampeding at all).

I doubt the CCC people didn't know that Dave Matthews or Jon Stewart would draw this kind of response. Why do their lines work so well, while the hockey line doesn't?

Three reasons - more supply to meet demand, no set start time (IMO the most important factor, at least from a stampede-prevention perspective), and these concert lines aren't an event. They aren't designed to be fun and entertaining. They don't involve the hockey team coming out to have a slap shot competition during the 3 day mandatory waiting period *after* line numbers have been distributed (or in this case, Jon Stewart coming out to tell jokes or Dave Matthews putting on an impromptu acoustic set). They involve a bunch of people sleeping on concrete or just staying up all night waiting to buy tickets because they want to make damn sure they're in the building when Jon Stewart says something funny, or Dave Matthews plays Ants Marching. And there's fun in that, but you have to make it fun for yourself, which is the way it should be.

If they dispense with all of the crap around the line, and announce it with no fanfare, saying tickets will go on sale on Sunday (date) at 6 PM at (location), and then make sure the location is set up to encourage orderly line formation (think the Ramin Room filled with Tensa-Barriers and a few security people once the line is long enough to warrant it) none of this would happen, and after the first year without any outside entertainment hardly anyone would bother skipping class on a Friday to buy tickets on a Sunday (all bets are off if Cornell wins multiple NCAA titles).

I feel like I've said all of this before, maybe a year or two ago. Which would've been about the time I stopped trying to get tickets through the line because, in the best twist to all of this, I can almost always get into the game. If I can do it, so can everyone else, which makes this whole fiasco all the more ridiculous.

The bottom line is you weren't there. You've heard some accounts etc. about what actually took place, but you yourself didn't witness it--I did. Anyone that knows me will attest to the fact that I am usually the first person to criticize the immaturity, disrespectfulness and plain stupidity of my peer group. In this case, the vast majority of my peers didn't exhibit any of those three characteristics. FROM WHAT I SAW...there was no flagrant trampling--if there was I am willing to bet it was limited to one or two isolated incidents.

What I saw was a number of CUPD (3 I think) forcibly push their way to the top of the stairs. Where they proceeded to scream "everyone near the steps move back." Unfortunately, many of the students followed the instructions of the police. Try and visualize this... people in the front are told to move back and the people in the back are told nothing--what do you think happens to the people in the middle? It was at this point that some people fell to the ground and were injured.

Although in the beginning the instincts of many of the students took over and they tried to push their way in, quickly everyone realized the futility of trying to push 2000 people through a single door. At this point, many people, including myself, yelled for everyone to stop pushing and to remain calm. Most of the crowd heeded our pleas to stop pushing. Trying to remain calm proved to be a much more difficult task, because everyone was squished next to each other. There were a few people who were feeling claustrophobic--I saw a number of people encouraging their fellow faithful to get through this ordeal.

I do not doubt that there were a few bad apples out of the approximately 2000 students trying to get into Lynah. Unfortunately, their actions were magnified by the domino effect of the close quarters that resulted due to the failure of the line. Although a few students did escalate the problem, neither these students nor the group as a whole were the root of the problem. I agree with you that it is pointless trying to assign blame or direct anger/hate at Gene Nighman. If you read my posts I try to discourage the "fire Gene Nighman" mentality. Instead, i feel the root of the problem (as far as safety was concerned) was the design of the ticket process. The design of the process did not properly control the speed and volume of the students that tried to secure line numbers.

The idea that students share much of the responsibility in the fact that "line" didn't resemble a "line" is unfair. The process this year seemed to be in many aspects similar to last year's. Last year there was no line...numbers were given out upon arrival. The goal was to get their as quick as possible. The athletics press release gave no indication that the same would not be true again this year. This year it was even more important to get to the "line" as quick as possible, as there were far more students on central campus and a matter of seconds could mean a difference of 100 numbers. So we bottled up all of our enthusiasm, anxiety, and energy for three nights, which erupted at the announcement of the location and a shot of adrenaline sent us running frantically to Lynah. It might have been more rational to, upon arrival, form a real line. But it wouldn't have been the more "human" thing to do as passionate Lynah Faithful. Sometimes acting rationally isn't the right thing to do.

In a moving crowd like that, a stampede only takes a handful of people (or buffalo, or whatever) to start. Similarly, pushing and shoving that results in a crush of people at a door when a line would be much more effective also takes just a few people to start. When I was talking about the jackasses above, I was talking about those people specifically. I probably should have made that more clear.

The bottom line is this - the people responsible for this line screwed up. Yes, the students themselves could have handled it better, and the few bad apples who were pushing and making a mess of the process, such as it was, deserve their share of the blame. But given the circumstances I think it all went reasonably well - AFAIK nobody got severely injured, nobody died, and Cornell should consider itself lucky and abandon all of this nonsense for future years. Just sell the tickets, instead of making an event out of it.

anyone at all beginning to feel pains throughout their body? I knew I was getting pushed alot and jammed into the stair railing, but now I am getting pains in my back where are getting worse and worse. Nothing unbearable, but still sucks.

Yeah....my ribs are unhappy

How many people are surprised by the results given the precautions taken. Enough of this acintg like 'adults' argument. I know plenty of people older than me who would have acted in the same manner. Probably, they would have been worse, believing that they were more entitled because they were 'adults'. And they might have acted more viciously because of it. Lets face it, people acted like people the other night. The reason that precautions are taken to maintain order in situations like this is because most people have accepted that fact that even intelligent people, as a group, are very very stupid.

[Q]mtmack25 Wrote:

How many people are surprised by the results given the precautions taken. Enough of this acintg like 'adults' argument. I know plenty of people older than me who would have acted in the same manner. Probably, they would have been worse, believing that they were more entitled because they were 'adults'. And they might have acted more viciously because of it. Lets face it, people acted like people the other night. The reason that precautions are taken to maintain order in situations like this is because most people have accepted that fact that even intelligent people, as a group, are very very stupid.[/q]

Very true. I love the Psych 101 classic about the experiment they did at Stanford where they locked students in a building for a weekend and divided them randomly into "prisoners" and "guards." They had to cut the experiment short because the physical and mental abuse was getting out of hand. The most intelligent and rational people will act as anything but if put into the wrong environment. Athletics needs to recognize this as a fact of human nature and design the environment accordingly.

Anything that doesn't involve stairways and locked doors would be a good start...

FYI...

I was just up at Bartels and Gene Nighman made an announcement that you can buy your tickets after 1 o'clock today (this was the stated deadline). The impression he gave was that staff would be their to take money/credit cards tonight and possibly tomorrow.

[Q]redhair34 Wrote:

FYI...

I was just up at Bartels and Gene Nighman made an announcement that you can buy your tickets after 1 o'clock today (this was the stated deadline). The impression he gave was that staff would be their to take money/credit cards tonight and possibly tomorrow. [/q]

No surprise by me, I just talked to some of my friends that are in that line at 12:40 and they said they were at least 1 1/2 hours from paying for their tickets. I cant believe that they did not listen to me about going on Tuesday or Wednesday like I did and spent the whole 5 mins paying for mine.

Is it true they gave out the tickets tonight??

only to grad students

New strategy for next year: befriend a grad student and use their ID to purchase tickets.

Well, I dont know how bad it was for grads overall, but that's still bullshit. Have a process where completely random people get top numbers, and then do nothing to weed the facetimers out (I actually know the ppl with top grad numbers and they are good fans, but still the idea is overall).