Season passes, switch to Ticketmaster and use of CarolinaCard among possible changes
After a football season marked by lost and fraudulent tickets, system crashes and complaints about upper-deck seating, USC is preparing for a major overhaul of its student ticket football distribution system.
The proposed changes were discussed at the first of three ticketing forums Monday afternoon, led by Student Ticketing Coordinator Adrienne White. The ticketing office invited the entire student body, but only five students — all members of Student Government were present at the meeting to discuss the changes, which are modeled after the University of Florida’s ticket distribution system.
One of the most significant changes proposed would be a switch from TicketReturn, the university’s current website, to Ticketmaster. Unlike TicketReturn, which is manned by offices in Virginia, Ticketmaster has a regional office in Columbia and is already used by the athletics department to manage season tickets. White says the switch would most likely eliminate the weekly Thursday night site crashes that reportedly kept hundreds of students up past 2 a.m. to request on-demand tickets. White said the crashes became more common with an increase in both student population and ticket requests.
“Student ticketing needs a new face,” White said. “After this year, you don’t want to put your faith in TicketReturn.”
A change to Ticketmaster also includes a reformatting of the entire ticket distribution system for the football season. Under the new system, rather than requesting a ticket every week, students would enter a lottery during the summer months for a season pass to all 2012 football games. Those unable to attend every game could transfer their unwanted tickets to a “donation page” from which students who didn’t receive season passes could request tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.
Seats in the upper deck would be included in the regular lottery. Proposals were made to group all upper-deck seats together to create a more unified student section, but White says this would depend on whether current seat holders renew their season passes.
Ticketing plans to carry out a trial run with selected students during baseball season. This will test the new plan’s proposal to transfer tickets onto the CarolinaCard so that students can be admitted by swiping their IDs rather than printing out their tickets.
The forum also discussed changing the distribution system for tickets to away games to a lottery system. Carolina Convoy tickets cost $100 and are currently purchased first-come, first-served.
Two more forums will be held — one today at noon and another Thursday at 5:30 p.m. in room 315 of the Russell House. White hopes to gather more input from students before plans are set in motion for the Ticketmaster trial run.
“When changes like this in student affairs are proposed to administration, if we don’t have student opinion to back it up, it means nothing,” White said.