Ticket sales again go wrong for many Pitt basketball fans

The new plan was supposed to run more smoothly and give everyone a fair shot at getting… The new plan was supposed to run more smoothly and give everyone a fair shot at getting men’s basketball season tickets.

In theory, it sounded good – sell the tickets online starting at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday. All students needed were their e-mail addresses, their ID numbers and credit cards. Then, the first 1,400 people to order tickets would get them.

But what actually took place Wednesday morning turned out to be just as chaotic and confusing – not to mention frustrating – as the lottery system used last year.

Jesse Rodgers tried to beat the crowd and first went to the athletics department’s Web site at 11:30 Tuesday night.

“The first thing that happened was with the IDs,” he said. “Some IDs worked, some IDs didn’t. I ended up using my brother’s ID, and it worked.”

But the problems did not end there. Rodgers said that once he was able to register, the server crashed, and he ended up waiting a couple of hours for it to load.

“I don’t know why [the athletics department] would put the faith of a system in the server,” Rodgers said. “It seems like a messed-up system. I’ve yet to talk to someone who got tickets.”

Students were able to get tickets, but most of them did not do it through the Web site.

“It was frustrating to be sitting there and have everything crash,” said Parker Crockford, who went to a computer lab to try to get online. “I ended up calling and getting my tickets over the phone around 8:40 or 8:50. I know of only one person who actually got the tickets online. By 8:45, people were leaving the computer lab and heading up to the [Petersen Events Center].”

When they were unable to get tickets online, students began calling the Pete’s ticket office, trying to find out what was wrong. According to Jim Earle, the associate athletics director for new business and fan development, when students began calling with complaints, the athletics department responded by taking orders over the phone.

“We tried to help right there, when people called,” Earle said. “We established that the system could not handle the amount of traffic on the site early this morning. We contacted the company to try to increase the bandwidth, and they were able to get it up and running.”

But some people were still having problems. Bob Bagaley tried to register early Wednesday morning, but every time he tried, the Web site would not work.

“It told me the site does not exist,” he said. “I came back later and put the stuff in, and it told me the server is busy, and it had a timer that said it would take 60 seconds. I sat there forever.”

While some students had trouble with their ID numbers, that was not the main problem. According to Earle, the number of students who could not get their IDs to work was small, and it was most likely due to the fact that their IDs were fairly new.

“Some people with new IDs are still in the system with the old code,” Earle said. “The issue was not with the codes; it was with a system overload.”

Earle continued by saying he wanted to apologize to students and hoped that the athletics department was able to take care of everyone.

“I feel bad for the students,” Earle said. “We really worked with [Student Government Board] to hear the concerns, and once again, we’ve made it difficult. I think it was a great setup; the system just couldn’t handle the traffic.”

But not everyone agreed with Earle.

“They said this was supposed to be so great,” Bagaley said, “but there’s nothing great about it.”