A brief history of ticketing

Many years ago, well before I was a student at N.C. State, students used to line up for vouchers in front of Reynolds Coliseum and then wait for a lottery to determine which numbered vouchers received tickets. Then they would receive a paper ticket with an assigned seat on it. Think ticket campouts, except you get a ticket with an assigned seat and for most games you didn’t have to spend the night for a voucher.

That system came crashing down in scandal when Student Government officials were caught grabbing hordes of vouchers for their friends and passing them out at will, allowing those with connections to bypass the system altogether.

So here we are today, four years later, with an Internet system that still doesn’t work with anything other than Internet Explorer and a spotted history of mishaps that can be attributed to holes in the distribution.

Think back to a few years ago and you may remember the infamous incident where students were forced to urinate in the stands because of overcrowding. Event staffers weren’t letting students enter section 7 or 8, so rather than risk losing a prime seat, students decided it was better to pee in the stands — it made national news.

The overcrowding was attributed to the ease in which counterfeit tickets were made. Students would sign up and receive a ticket individually, and if they got a ticket in a less desirable section: they’d just find a friend with a ticket in a better section, make a copy, stick it in their back pocket and use that to gain entrance at the section gate once they were in the stadium.

Overcrowding in the sections led to another publicity issue for the school as the top corner of sections 14 and 15 are constantly empty at kickoff, leaving an embarrassing hole in an otherwise packed stadium. Finally, my least favorite consequence of this new system is the incredibly long lines getting into the stadium — students only have two gates to choose from and must be scanned, searched and stamped before they can enter the gates.

Many schools use a similar online system — it has an incredible convenience factor because students can just print a ticket from their laptop without waiting in lines. Some schools sell their tickets at the beginning of the year with a one-time lottery that provides a set seat or section for games. The downside is that it’s an extra charge and if you’re not chosen in the initial lottery, you’re out of luck for the entire season.

Our current quasi-general admission system is not the best for our games. If we truly wanted to expedite entrance into the games, truly utilize the idea of “group seating” and ensure a filled up student section we’d go back to assigned seating for the games.

I’m not naïve enough to think we’ll begin to use vouchers again, but there has to be a compromise between what we have now and what an ideal distribution method would be.