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Matthew Youngblood - THE BATTALION
Thousands of students camp out to pull tickets for the UT game on Jan. 31. Their wait, however, proved to be in vain after the midnight announce-ment that the ticket pull was canceled.

Basketball lottery a concern for students

By: John Farmer

Posted: 2/13/07

Dustin Hubertus, a senior industrial distribution major, was one of 11,000 students with an All Sports Pass who did not get a ticket for Tuesday's basketball game against Texas Tech University.

After Jan. 31, when 6,000 fans attempted to camp out over night for tickets to the game against The University of Texas, a random lottery system was implemented.

"I understand why they are doing it this way," Hubertus said. "It doesn't seem like they have much of a choice. I wish, however, that we'd seen better planning so that we could have a plan for when this point in the season arrived."

During the non-conference games, attendance peaked at close to 11,000, leaving 1,500 seats open. Since conference games began, however, the only two games with open seats were versus Iowa State and Kansas State. The KSU game took place on Jan. 6, before most students were back from the break. Texas A&M played Iowa State on the night before the Texas pull, which many speculate led to a decrease in attendance.

"Clearly, the administration did not expect interest to soar this high," said Craig Birkenfeld, a senior agricultural engineering major. "Once the Texas debacle occurred, I think they've been scrambling to come up with a plan."

As of now, it seems as though the lottery system will be in place until the end of this season. Next year however, there may be a number of changes. One alteration that a number of students expect to be implemented is including a basketball-only option when purchasing sports passes.

"The basketball-only option for sports passes shows the dramatic change going on at A&M," Hubertus said. "We are quickly becoming a basketball school. I think it's awesome."

In the meantime, the lottery system has polarized a number of students. By registering online with Aggie Athletics, students place themselves in a pool. Students who have attended one to three games get two entries into the lottery. Students who have been to four to six games get three entries, and so forth, according to a University-wide e-mail.

The idea behind the weighted pull is that dedicated fans that support the team on a consistent basis will be rewarded for their dedication. Thus, the stands will be filled with more rabid fans, giving Reed Arena a louder home court advantage.

However, a number of students feel this policy is unfair to those who simply have not had a way to go to some of the non-conference games.

"With finals coming up, I was finishing one of the most difficult semesters that I will have here at A&M," Hubertus said. "I was studying enough that I only made it to one of the games last semester. Why should somebody be given an advantage over me because they didn't have as much going on?"

Other students feel like their support helped the team when no one else was there.

"At the Grambling State (game), there was next to no one there," said Samantha Bruce, a freshman nutritional sciences major. "Yet, a number of us stood in the stands, screaming our lungs out. So what's wrong with the school recognizing that?"

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that this is an exciting time for our basketball team, and whichever way the seats are filled, it has certainly been entertaining.

Christopher Farmer, Class of 2004, said he is impressed by the progress of this year's basketball team.

"As we trudge forward in this brave new world of Dick Vitale and Final Four talk, I can't tell you how jealous I am of the current students," Farmer said.