Pitt students, if you’re not mad right now, you should be. And here’s why: The Petersen… Pitt students, if you’re not mad right now, you should be. And here’s why: The Petersen Events Center has 12,500 seats, but there’s no room for you.

Thursday night, more than 120 students gathered in the Lower Lounge of the William Pitt Union with the hope of purchasing one of the 97 basketball season ticket passes that went unclaimed in the student ticket lottery.

Students began gathering in the lounge as early as 1 p.m. Thursday with the ticket office scheduled to open 9 a.m. Friday. Do the math; that’s a 20-hour wait.

They camped out with sleeping bags, pillows and folding chairs, and stayed awake with homework, card games and video game systems.

Roll was taken every hour on the hour and any student who slept through it was crossed off the list and lost his or her place in line.

None of this should have happened.

There shouldn’t have been people sitting in the Union for 20 hours, there shouldn’t have been only 97 season tickets left and there shouldn’t have been only 1,000 season tickets to begin with.

The Petersen Events Center has 12,500 seats and the fact that students will occupy only 1,500 of them during home games is an injustice. For the University to build a new arena and essentially tell the students they don’t matter as much as the locals who can afford to pay $150 for a season pass in the nosebleed section goes against the spirit of college basketball.

This game is about the students.

The Petersen Events Center has 12,500 seats, so they shouldn’t be able to tell students, “There’s no room for you.”

There should be, at the very least, 5,000 student tickets for every home game.

Pitt’s basketball team is recognized by virtually every poll in the country as being one of the nation’s 10 best and I think the students deserve more credit.

It would have been easy for students to give up on the Panthers back when their best player was Marc Blount.

But the students didn’t give up. They continued to support the team, attend the games and do their part to help keep the program popular. If students had quit caring, there likely wouldn’t be a Petersen Events Center and the basketball program would be struggling to stay on par with the Forbes Avenue rival: the Duquesne Dukes.

If the students are as much a part of the program as head coach Ben Howland said they are, why has it become so difficult for students to attend games?

I’ve heard it argued that the reason there were so few student tickets available was that student tickets are cheap and the University wants its investment to start paying for itself immediately. That means more public sales of season and individual game tickets.

What’s the hurry? Is the University starved for money to the point that it has to make as much back in one year as it can?

The Pete is a magnificent facility and, barring new developments in the composition of hardwood floors, it is unlikely to be outdated for quite some time.

And if it’s money that they’re worried about, I for one, would not be opposed to a $5 to $10 hike in ticket prices if it means that a few thousand more students would get to attend games.

It’s up to the students to try fixing this. Pitt athletics director Steve Pederson isn’t going to wake up one day and suddenly decide that there should be a stronger student presence at basketball games.

In all likelihood, Pederson is more concerned with using the new facility to make money for the University and to gain notoriety for himself than to appease students.

If this angers you as much as it does me, take some kind of action. Write a letter, make a few phone calls and encourage others to do so.

They raised our tuition, they stuck us in the back corner of Heinz Field and now, for whatever reason, they are keeping too many of us out of basketball games. I think it’s time we blow the whistle.

The Petersen Events Center has 12,500 seats and there SHOULD be room for you.

Matt Wein is a columnist for The Pitt News. He can be reached at [email protected].