The UW Athletics ticket office mistakenly distributed UW Marching Band member seat tickets to students at Saturday's football game, resulting in some frustration and confusion among student season ticket holders.
""So they wound up going down and sitting in those seats, and then when it was time for the band to come down, they had to move the students back and the ticket office, once it discovered that had happened, they stopped giving those out,"" said UW Athletics spokesperson Justin Doherty. ""So, basically, they had just accidentally not pulled the band tickets out of the student allotment yet.""
Some students described the situation as a large inconvenience, while others, specifically band members, said they had not even heard about the ticket debacle.
UW-Madison junior Tyler Eichorst said the situation was ""incredibly annoying"" and that some drunken students were being ""really obnoxious and belligerent"" about their seats being taken away, but that he simply relocated to an aisle.
""It was really confusing—people were sort of packed in like sardines,"" Eichorst said. ""No one really knew what was going on until we caught wind of the fact that 300 students or so got the wrong tickets.""
According to UW Marching Band's Assistant Drum Major and UW-Madison senior Eric Halverson, the tickets were being dispensed as the band was coming back to its seating area from the field.
""I just heard about a bunch of commotion about people getting spots that were supposed to be band spots,"" Halverson said, explaining that the section is a gated area meant to seat the band's 288 members.
Usually, Halverson said, no tickets are distributed for those seats, considering band members do not need them to enter the game.
Halverson said his parents have student tickets and noticed non-band members entering seats in higher sections of the band seating area. The Ticket Office relocated students before the entire band area filled up with student ticket holders.
""I got to my seat fine, though,"" Halverson said. ""I actually didn't know anything about it at all until my parents told me after half-time.""
This snafu comes after various UW Athletic ticket complications in the past two years. A recent revamp of football tickets now requires students to redeem their vouchers the morning of the game, rather than the Wednesday before, an effort aimed toward preventing students from camping out in front of the Kohl Center days in advance. In 2005, the UW Athletic ticket office oversold the amount of basketball tickets it was able to distribute and consequently instituted a lottery system. Students who did not receive tickets in the lottery received refunds of their season ticket purchases.
