""Sorry, I'm confused as hell,"" the instant message on my computer read. ""I just found out that my seats are going to be crap for yet another season. I would be willing to wait in line, but I do not even have time to organize a group to wait with,"" another message read.
Chaotic, frustrating, unfair and ridiculous were just some other words that appeared during an online conversation with a friend who had just discovered he received tickets in the men's basketball season ticket lottery.
Like the year before, the excitement of winning basketball tickets quickly turned into the anxiety associated with obtaining phenomenal seats.
Cell phone calls and instant messages crossed campus last Thursday afternoon as students instantly had to contact friends and hope they could find potential basketball buddies for the upcoming season. This means some students already had their place in line before others even knew they received tickets, which is completely absurd.
To inform a student they won tickets at 2:30 p.m. and then to open group registration at 5 p.m. that same day does not make sense.
And yet, the university athletic department is not stupid—it knows what it is doing. There is such demand for tickets that there is no pressure to change the policy, let alone pressure to justify allowing students to camp out on university property.
Miraculously, there happened to be two entire days to get friends organized into a group that could receive season tickets. However, if you took that long, you probably got some pretty bad seats.
Honestly, this is UW-Madison, and very few students want to settle for the nosebleed section, especially during a season in which the team could conceivably go undefeated at home.
As esteemed as the UW-Madison athletic department is, it is discouraging that one of its prized components does not give its die-hard student fan base a better chance to support the team.
Under the current system, a group of students that is able to organize and sit outside for one night receives the best seats for an entire season, while someone that may not have been able to form a group, or just simply was out of town when the tickets were distributed, gets the shaft.
Seating prospects for students who won basketball tickets are arbitrarily decided by their class schedule. If students had classes Thursday afternoon, they were already positioned in line behind those that did not.
Instead of handing out the tickets for the entire season all at once, the basketball program should follow the act of the football program and hand out tickets on game day—first come, first served.
This method of distribution would also make it easier to sell individual tickets, since each game a person could sit with different friends in different locations. A group of students who did not receive season tickets could then go to a game together.
No matter the distribution method, there will be naysayers, but ultimately students need to have an option. Either give them time to form groups and let them wait outside like the hockey fans, or distribute the seats on game day like football. Do not hold students ransom and force them to congregate for a one or two day period outside the Kohl Center gates.
To be fair, athletic department officials did a superb job of distributing tickets on Saturday. They are not the problem—the distrubution process itself is.
If you received men's basketball tickets, be thankful for that. Essentially, the tickets themselves are the only positive that can come out of the current ticket distribution system. But even that is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
