Better line ideas?

[Dave \'02]

It's been a few years since I had season tickets, but it seems to be getting worse every year.  Why doesn't Cornell instituate a program like Wake Forest has?  Wake has a student group called the Screamin' Deamons, which is on a first come, first serve basis.  The group membership is capped at a certain amount and the whole group is guaranteed a seat for basketball games.  The kicker is, you have to go to all the football games.  If you don't, then you get bounced and they go down the list adding people.  I think this would be beneficial for two reasons.  One is that people would have to show their hockey dedication by going to football games and the second is that it would actually get people to go to football games.  Thoughts?

[redhair34]

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[French Rage]

The obvious choice is to announce the time and let people line up whenever they want.  This is the obvious consensus idea to everyone everywhere.  Thus, Cornell will never let it happen.

[cornelldavy]

The fairest way would probably be to drop the tickets from a helicopter hovering over the Arts Quad and then let the teeming masses fight it out for them. I hear they're considering this for next year.

[Will]

[Q]cornelldavy Wrote:

 The fairest way would probably be to drop the tickets from a helicopter hovering over the Arts Quad and then let the teeming masses fight it out for them. I hear they're considering this for next year.[/q]

I've suggested the same thing, except that it would be over Schoellkopf. ;-)

And obviously, the real fairest way for ticket distribution is to just give them all to me and let me distribute them as I see fit.  It's so obvious to me; I don't know why everyone else can't see that. :-D

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

The way they did it in the late 70's to early 80's seemed to work.  

Divide the student section up into three parts sold on three different days.  The first part is only open to senior and grad students.  The second part is open to anyone who got shut out on day 1 plus sophs and juniors.  The third day is open to any student.  You could buy a ticket anywhere in the student section on any day.  Limit two seats per person.  Despite the three day sale, there was only a significant line on the first day.  And that line policed itself.

This assures that seniors get better seats, thus rewarding loyalty, and shuts out freshman facetimers.  It did tend to give better priority to Greeks, but it still limited fraternity blocks to the size of their senior class.

[jtwcornell91]

I was suggesting last night that we let a crowd form around Uris and have a sniper in McGraw Tower pick them off with line-number-encoded radio darts like on some old safari show.

[Trotsky]

Arm prior season ticket holders.

[DeltaOne81]

[Q]cornelldavy Wrote:

 The fairest way would probably be to drop the tickets from a helicopter hovering over the Arts Quad and then let the teeming masses fight it out for them. I hear they're considering this for next year.[/q]

On the bright side, it'd be safer too!

[MB]

Why not just sell them on the Tuesday of fall break?  It's coming up soon, you wouldn't miss any games, you could camp out, etc...

[Free11Skier]

All jokes aside, why not do what Duke Basketball does?  They are at least (if not more) concerned with academics as Cornell is.  Sell tickets before prelim season so as to minimize the impact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzyzewskiville

[billhoward]

"There's no bad publicity so long as they spell your name right" does not apply to three students being trampled to death in a hockey ticket line. Cornell was lucky something like that didn't happen. Or are the hundred different posters here all making it up?

What about a partial lottery, say for 500 or 1,000 seats? Anybody can enter and if you don't get picked there, you can still go into the student, grad student, etcetera lines. If say 500 of the 1,000 lottery winners are hockey-mad people who simply had to have tickets, that saves them from the line and makes the line more manageable. Maybe the lottery winners have to pledge not to re-sell their tickets and you enforce it by having spot and announced ID checks at a half-dozen games ... and you'd get a yellow card if you hadn't registered the ticket transfer at eCornellTickets.edu. [Probably too much red tape.]

That would mean each of the ticket pools would be reduced by a couple hundred tickets. No free lunch.

Did Cornell really allocate one not two tickets per person in line? Let's see, wouldn't that make the line twice as long, twice as unruly, twice as dangerous?

That ~500-seat expansion of Lynah should help.

Cornell could (not necessarily should) adjust demand through pricing.

On the other hand, the rush for season tickets reinforces the popularity of hockey and makes them all the more desirable. Porsche once said the proper production level for its cars is "one less than the demand."

[Trotsky]

[Q]Free11Skier Wrote:
All jokes aside, why not do what Duke Basketball does?  They are at least (if not more) concerned with academics as Cornell is.[/q]

I thought you said all jokes aside?  Duke's interest in academics ends squarely where athletics begins.  Not that I'm advocating that level of hypocrisy for Cornell, but really, their reputation as the guardian of integrity among basketball powers is the product of public relations, nothing more.