ASSIGNMENT #1
One of the most exciting things in college sports is the involvement of the student sections at various venues. For me, I think of the Cameron Crazies, the Pit Crew or the 12th Man as great examples of how much influence the fans can have on a sporting event. On a growing number of college campuses, especially successful campuses, the issue of how to handle student ticket requests is becoming an issue.
At Texas A&M their problem was that they had too many people vying for too little seating. While football was a separate pass that you had to get, all of the other sports got lumped into an all-sports pass. When the Aggies were a mediocre team there was not as big of an issue with basketball seats because not everyone that had an all-sports pass wanted to go to the basketball games.
When Billy Gillespie took over as coach, Texas A&M’s record changed for the better and they started being more successful. And as most fans know, the greater the success, the harder tickets become. This was true for not only the casual fan, but Aggie students as well. To accommodate the growing need for student tickets, Texas A&M started using a ticket pull system for students that had an all-sports pass. Simplistically speaking, the students just had to be the one of the first 4,000 students in line to get a ticket.
Without knowing specifically which colleges use this system, it would be easy to say that this practice happens on a lot of college campuses. For instance, the students at Duke University have an area called Krzyzewskiville where they camp out for tickets to every game, not just the big ones. In this case, Texas A&M was just following previous customs. Even when it added a lottery system to the student ticket system there are other colleges using this system as well.
While the lottery system works on making sure that only the number of tickets that the administration wants to issue goes to certain students, it also does not take into...