The ins and outs of ticket pickup
With another basketball season underway comes a whole different season of subsequent student ticket pick-ups.
This season comes with a change to the number of tickets that can be retrieved per pick up. Last year, students could get tickets to two or three games per pick-up. This year, the Office of Marketing and Ticketing decided to have a pick-up for each home game.
Associate athletic director of Ticketing and Marketing, Russell Wilkins, said this change is solely for the purpose of filling Koch Arena to its maximum capacity. With multiple tickets per pickup, student section attendance would lack, Wilkins said.
“We’d end up with people picking up both tickets [per release] but only showing up to one of the games,” Wilkins said. “Now we are allowing it to be affordable to pass on a ticket, since it’s individual.”
Wilkins said those who went to pick up tickets for a specific game had no reason to turn down the free second ticket, but that kept the attendance numbers so subpar that men’s head coach Gregg Marshall pleaded the student body to fill the stands.
Student attendance at the Shocker games stooped as low as 500 of the 1,000 seats available in the student section.
“We really want to fill up the place,” Wilkins said. “[If you don’t], it really takes down the whole product.”
If student tickets don’t run out within 48 hours, the ticket office opens their availability up to the public for sale prices, though rarely do the student tickets last that long.
Wilkins says the record ticket sell-out time is 10:30 a.m., though, contrary to popular belief, students don’t even need to camp to score tickets for high-profile games such as the UNI game last year for College Game-Day.
The first venue to host ticket sales is the Heskett Center, which opens its doors at 7 a.m. for pick-ups. Not far behind is the University Bookstore, opening normally at 8 a.m., and then finally the Koch arena ticket office at 8:30 a.m. The South and West WSU campuses are also given student tickets for pick-up.
The Heskett Center and bookstore each distribute 100 tickets per pickup during the normal season (they can distribute less during Christmas break), the South and West campuses get 25 tickets each to distribute, and the rest of the tickets are found at the ticket office.
If one location runs out of tickets, odds are, there is still hope.
“It’s very, very rare to sell out all places [in one morning],” Wilkins said. “Stay in your warm beds. Come out at 9:15 a.m. You’re still going to get tickets.”
