BRENDAN KING | Staff Reporter
Photo By: Amy Street
The student ticketing process for Butler men’s basketball games is going to change this fall. The ticketing process will move away from students picking up their tickets at the Hinkle Fieldhouse ticket office. Instead, students will get tickets through online access only, said Lindsay Martin, sports marketing manager.
Moving online only makes the process more complicated.
The system where tickets were available at Hinkle for in-person pick up only lasted one season. As a Butler student who attended nearly every game this season, I can say stopping by Hinkle and getting a ticket was one of the easiest and simplest processes the athletics department could have come up with.
All students had to do was go up to the ticket office, flash their Butler ID, and walk away with tickets for the next two or three home games.
“The process we used this past year was always considered a stop-gap measure,” Martin said. “We needed to address the issues and concerns with the ID-only process immediately.”
But what were the problems with the ID-only process? Martin said student attendance to basketball games increased significantly this season.
Not once did I hear anyone talk badly or request a change in the ticketing process.
On my way to Hinkle to get tickets every week, there were always many students doing the same thing and getting their tickets ahead of time.
Call me old school, but I prefer an actual ticket to take to games instead of a printed out piece of paper that can easily be misplaced or thrown away.
Details of the new plan have not been released or finalized yet. Martin said the plan will be finalized by Welcome Week this August.
This concerns me.
I want to see the online ticketing system succeed. Every student has access to a computer in some way. Students at Butler have access to printers whether they are in dorms or other buildings across campus. Finding the correct technology is not the problem.
The problem I foresee is students forgetting to get tickets in time or misplacing the paper they printed out.
The Dawg Pound did a nice job of communicating this year with students, reminding us to go to Hinkle and pick up tickets. I know when I got a ticket to an important game that I kept an eye on it and locked it up until game day. If my ticket is simply a piece of paper, it can get thrown out or misplaced.
If the plan has not been finalized, how is the athletics department so confident that it will work? What if student response is negative and attendance drops? If the administrators had the plan and website finalized now, it would make many people—including me—feel a lot more confident about student attendance for next year.
With a growing basketball program that needs student interaction, the students and their support are the biggest factors in this whole process.
