Once again, a basketball ticketing mess

What initially appeared as a much-welcomed gesture of goodwill toward students’ ticketing… What initially appeared as a much-welcomed gesture of goodwill toward students’ ticketing concerns seemed, at the end of the day, like a gesture of another kind – a big, extended middle finger.

To avoid a repeat of last year’s basketball ticketing debacle – which ended with a lot of unhappy, diehard fans without tickets, and a lot of “just lucky,” lottery-winning, casual fans with student season tickets they didn’t really want – the department decided to implement a new system, wherein students could log on to the official department Web site at 8:30 Wednesday morning, enter their valid Pitt e-mail addresses, student ID numbers and credit card numbers, and, if they were among the first 1,400 to do so, get the coveted student tickets.

It seemed so simple. So elegant. So fair.

Students were trying to pre-register as early as midnight. Wednesday morning, the site was crashing because of excessive traffic, the ticketing window wasn’t coming up, and refreshing the site often proved futile.

Some frustrated students called the box office at the Pete, or even hiked up to the box office there. In an astonishing display of preference for ticket revenue over any semblance of fairness, the Pete box office sold tickets as early as 8 a.m.

During the time tickets were supposed to be available online, the department realized – shock! – that the site couldn’t handle the traffic and called the company that runs the site in an attempt to get an emergency increase in bandwidth. Let’s see if we can think of a better time to have made that call – how about at the time when the decision was made to offer tickets through the site?

What should have been an automated, calm, fair way to distribute tickets to those most desirous of them turned into a free-for-all. Offering tickets at the Pete was a gross injustice to those fans who attempted to follow the set guidelines.

But after all is said and done – and it is; nothing can be done to remedy the situation now – Pitt sold all the tickets. They made all the money they could from student seating.

A monkey could have figured out that the Web site might have had problems handling the traffic. With no investigation into the capabilities of the site and no contingency plan, the University has demonstrated a disgraceful lack of planning and consideration for students. Once again.

Commitment. Teamwork. Pride.