After four months of debate about more than a dozen proposals, the university Athletic Council will vote early next month on a proposed reallocation of football tickets after Ohio State switches to semesters in 2012.
The Finance and Facilities subcommittee of the Council presented its recommendation April 6, but before the full council votes to accept or reject the subcommittee’s recommendation, other issues are quickly filling up the agenda.
In the final article of a three-part series, The Lantern explores proposed ticket packages for students, as well as faculty and staff, after the semester switch.
When a subcommittee of the University Athletic Council presented its recommendation for how football tickets should be redistributed after Ohio State’s semester switch in 2012, students on the council were less than thrilled.
“If I had to grade it, I would give it a low B or a high C,” said Peter Koltak, one of the students on the council.
The plan, which the full council will vote on in May, didn’t add any tickets to the total number available for students, even though under a semester calendar, they will be on campus for more early football games.
Students on the council had advocated for 20,000 more tickets to be added to their group.
“It’s not a home run for students,” said Micah Kamrass, a student member of the council and the president-elect of USG, when he first learned of the recommendation.
The plan didn’t change the total number of tickets available for the faculty, staff or alumni, either.
But one thing that will change, said Karen Mancl, chair of the Finance and Facilities Subcommittee, is how tickets are organized within each group.
“We’re having lots more meetings and gathering lots more data to make decisions … about how tickets will be distributed within each constituency group,” she said.
Now, most student tickets are purchased as part of a “short season” package that generally contains all four Big Ten games and a non-conference game. If students want to attend all the home games, they have to purchase the rest of the early non-conference games individually.
Under the subcommittee proposal, there would be a full-season package, containing every home game, and a Big Ten package containing just those four games.
Koltak said the current short season and the proposed Big Ten season are “very similar.”
Another option that the committee had considered was a three-game split-season for students. From the outset, students were against that, he said, because it reduced the number of students at Big Ten games.
Also, Koltak said students on the council worried that under a three-game split, some students would have been stuck with three less-exciting games.
That proposal “was forcing us into a worse position at no expense to faculty and staff,” he said.
After the subcommittee recommendation, Mancl said, the next step
is working with each group to hammer out details of ticket packages.
For students, that includes determining who will be eligible to purchase the proposed full-season student ticket packages.
Starting in June, the Athletic Department will begin taking ticket orders based on how many credit hours a student has. This will determine who orders football tickets first.
Furthermore, this new credit-hour system will probably make it easier for higher-ranking students to purchase full-season tickets after the semester switch.
“The higher your rank, the more options you’d have,” said Danelle Wilbraham, a graduate student representative on the council. But she acknowledged that students with a lower number of credit hours might find it difficult to buy full-season tickets under this system.
Selling tickets based on class rank “makes sense,” she said, “but then there’s the nitty-gritty of how ranks are assigned.”
Rankings determined by credit hours would put graduate students at a disadvantage because they generally take fewer credit hours than professional and undergraduate students, she said.
“It’s still in the discussion stages now,” she said.
Mancl said just as the students have taken the lead in determining their ticket packages, “the faculty and staff will do the same. It’s the fair way.”
Faculty and staff tickets are divided into a full season and a three-game split-season. But the distribution is heavily weighted toward full-season tickets.
There are about 14,000 full-season tickets and usually fewer than 2,000 split-season tickets.
Creating new faculty and staff ticket packages is intertwined with the point system that now determines which faculty and staff are eligible to purchase tickets, Mancl said.
If the council makes changes to the point system, it could create more diverse ticket packages for all the various groups in the faculty and staff ticket pool, she said.
Mancl didn’t give specifics, but Koltak mentioned limiting retirees’ access to a split season rather than a full season as a possibility.
Amy Ehrlich, chairwoman of the University Staff Advisory Council, said her organization, which advocates for administrative staff, was “definitely open” to increasing the number of split-season tickets if it would improve access for faculty and staff.
Another issue is the high rate at which faculty and staff members upgrade their tickets.
Tickets are upgraded when faculty and staff pay the ticket office the difference between a full-price ticket and their discounted rate. The tickets can then be given away or re-sold.
Seventy percent of faculty and staff tickets are upgraded, Mancl said.
The lack of alternatives to full-season tickets is not necessarily the
cause of the high faculty and staff upgrade rate, Mancl said. She said the subcommittee didn’t have enough data yet on the upgrade rate.
Koltak said faculty and staff upgrade tickets for a variety of reasons.
Sometimes, tickets are upgraded so other family members can use them, he said, but sometimes it’s also to sell them for profit.
“It’s hard to pin down who’s doing it for what reason,” he said.
Mancl said she couldn’t provide a clear timetable for when each of the groups would present recommendations about their ticket packages.
She said she doubted all of it could be completed by the end of this school year, and confirmed only that it would be done before tickets were sold for the 2012 football season.
“There’s a lot of data collection going on, and the people we’re collecting it from have other jobs, other things to do,” she said.
Three of the four students are leaving the council at the end of the quarter because their terms will end, but Mancl said she hopes she can work with them to come up with their recommendation before then.
“They’ve been so thoughtful and really invested a lot in really understanding the issues,” she said, “and it’s not that the next group won’t be, but it would be nice for them to finish this job before the end of their terms.”
