EDITORIAL – Basketball ticket system rewards the loyal

It may be complicated enough to require a flowchart, but Pitt’s new system for selling student… It may be complicated enough to require a flowchart, but Pitt’s new system for selling student basketball tickets seems to be the easiest way to fill the Peterson with real fans.

Like the past two years, tickets will be sold online – this season, though, a server crash is highly unlikely. The previous crashes were largely attributed to the thousands of people attempting to access the server at the same time. However, this year, a new company, TicketReturn, is hosting the online server.

Because there are no student season tickets this year, there is no need for everyone to log on at the same time. Instead, tickets will be sold through a lottery, on a game-by-game basis. Students who purchase tickets for – and attend – the season’s earlier and less exciting games will have increased odds of getting tickets for later games based on a “loyalty points” system.

With this system, the best way to get a ticket to the Syracuse game later in the season is to attend as many of the games leading up to it as possible. The more games a student attends, the better his or her chances will be of getting the most desirable tickets.

There are plenty of students on campus who consider themselves big fans of Pitt basketball and who try to get season tickets. Still, even when every seat in the student section of the Pete has been accounted for, it was often only partially full for the season’s lesser games because many season ticket holders only went to a few of the games they had purchased tickets for.

By eliminating season tickets, Pitt clears those seats for people who really want them – or who really want to ensure a seat at one of the more in-demand games and are willing to work for it.

The new system also makes it impossible for students to buy tickets then sell them or give them away. Students who successfully bid for tickets will print them offline; each ticket will be printed with the buyer’s name as well as a scannable bar code. Students who buy tickets and don’t show up will lose loyalty points.

Though game-by-game ticket sales appear to be promising, there are a few questions left. It is imperative that the points system reset at the end of each season. Otherwise, freshmen, and even sophomores, who have not spent several years on campus building up loyalty points will rarely be able to attend games.

Also, students need to be able to understand the new system. There are instructions at www.pittsburghpanthers.com; hopefully, they make sense to students.

Previously, the University has had no reason to increase the admittedly small student section – too many games were played with too few students actually showing up. If this new procedure works as promised, 1,400 student fans will fill the stands each game. Perhaps then more seats will be made available.