College basketball. It’s a sport that attracts millions of fans daily and generates loads of money for successful schools. Even with all of the worldwide attention it brings, at its core, the sport is for the students. Students play the game. Students attend the games. Students cover the games. One of the perks of being a student is having access to see their school’s team on campus, often for free or at a manageable price. That is, until it isn’t manageable anymore, thanks to the resale of tickets.
Russell Hanson, a UConn alum and current Molecular and Cell Biology PhD student, spoke about this issue on Twitter Thursday. The conversation began with UConn fans’ disapproval of Kansas’ intricate student ticket process, which involves camping out in Allen Fieldhouse for 16 hours for three straight days. Then Hanson shined a light on UConn’s imperfect system.
“There’s a master list that comes out at the beginning of the season when you go into your student tickets that tells you when they go on sale,” Hanson explained to the Daily Campus. “I always have an alarm set on my phone. The student tickets go on the website, and you log in and grab your ticket. You get one ticket and it’s first come, first serve, which wasn’t an issue the last two years. You could go a day late, unless it was like Villanova, where people are keyed in.”
The process Hanson describes doesn’t seem problematic on the surface, but as UConn basketball regains popularity among the student body, claiming a ticket is becoming more and more difficult.
“It’s awesome that people want to go to the games and the tickets are going like this,” Hanson said. “If you’re not on at night or even the next morning, you can’t get your tickets. But a big problem with this is that people know that people want to go. I think athletics here is one of the most fun things you can do, and people realize that. That’s where we run into some issues.”
Students who are aware of the system can make a considerable profit if they claim tickets and resell them. A note on the ticket website says that “student tickets are for personal use only and are ineligible for transfer. Ticket claim privileges may be revoked if tickets are found listed on a secondary market site,” but nothing enforces it. Hanson knows one reseller personally who has consistently benefited from the system.
“They just know to get these tickets,” Hanson noted of the reseller. “They sold their NAU ticket for $40, they sold the first women’s game for $40. And I know, talking to some of the undergrads – and I see it on Snapchat as well – there’s a lot of reselling of tickets going on all the time. The [men’s game versus] UNH is a perfect example of that. I was unable to get a student ticket for that one, but I showed up and I was able to sit front row [on the upper student section opposite the main one]. I was saying, ‘How was I not able to get a student ticket for this? There’s no one here.’ And I think it’s because people are reselling tickets.”
Hanson doesn’t see this issue stopping at empty seats against New Hampshire.
“It’s UNH now for $30, but I know how this goes,” Hanson said. “It’s going to be Villanova for $100, Providence for $150. I could be crazy here, and it may not be that way, but I think we’re going to see some pretty insane resale and pricing to get into games that should be free for students who want to go.”
This isn’t a new issue either. Hanson remembers comparable situations back when he was an undergraduate in Storrs.
“I’m not saying the resale problem didn’t exist back then,” he recalls. “People would get their tickets for $120, and they’d be selling them for $300, and people got mad about that then. But at least with the lottery system, you had a shot.”
When comparing UConn’s current system to Kansas’s, Hanson actually sees the merit in the way the Jayhawks do things.
“The Kansas thing looks insane because it’s three days out,” he said. “But I think that tells us where the state of our program is right now. It’s the reigning national champs versus the previous national champs, and we have kids coming out three days in advance to see it. I don’t quite understand their system, but it seems like the people who want to be there are going to be in the building. That’s what’s important. We need a system that rewards people who want to be there.”
There are ways to solve UConn’s issue. Taking inspiration from some musical artists he follows, Hanson laid out a system that he thinks will remedy the problem.
“When you go to [Madison Square Garden], you can’t take a screenshot of your ticket,” Hanson explains. “I think for something that’s free, and for the students, you could have an online system like this. First come, first serve, and if you miss out on that, you miss out – it happens. But the ticket can’t be transferable, screenshots can’t work and you can’t give them to people. Then you have a pool of people who didn’t get them who go into a waiting list. If you don’t want your ticket, you can put it back into the pool, maybe 12, 24 hours before [tipoff] and it can go to someone on the waiting list. The goal here is to give the tickets to people who want them. You could also have a strike rule. If you have a ticket in your account and it doesn’t get scanned, you get a strike. After three strikes, you can’t get tickets anymore for the season.”
With the current system in place, it puts people who can’t claim tickets in a tough situation.
“I’m seeing these people tweeting that their kids want to go to these games,” Hanson said. “Everyone who comes here should get to see UConn basketball. It’s a bummer if you want to go see it, and you can’t.”
And from the perspective of those selling the tickets? They weren’t so excited to discuss. After contacting a handful of resellers, many were eager to sell me tickets, but none stuck around to discuss why they did so.
This is a broken system in Hanson’s and many other UConn fans’ eyes. It may be time for the university to take up some of Hanson’s ideas to return college basketball to the students who really want to see it. Until then, there are going to be many profiting and others on the outside of Gampel Pavilion looking in.
I’ve been to HCC and got tickets (behind the basket) 10 mins before the game started. It was a great time every night being at those games.