News > February 12, 2004

By Jason Mazda

Sports Editor

The basketball ticket distribution for the North Carolina, Duke and Cincinnati games disappointed many students on Feb. 6.

After problems involving Student Government’s initial refusal to recognize the unofficial list, created and managed by Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity, everyone eventually discovered that there were only enough tickets available for around 185 people, who each represented six ticketholders.

Approximately 300 people had lined up hoping for tickets.

According to a Student Government press release, SG president and senior Maeve Goff initially believed that, based on previous distributions, around 1,800 tickets would be available.

However, at 3 p.m. Feb. 5, just two hours before the campout, “sports marketing communicated that approximately 1,400 student tickets would be available,” the press release stated. “This number led SG to believe that students who were number 230 or higher would have low likelihood of getting tickets,” the release continued.

While students were upset when they found out that only 1,400 tickets were available, they became outraged when the distributors ran out of tickets after 1,116 — 684 tickets shy of the usual 1,800 tickets given.

In the press release, SG described itself as “shocked” to discover that there were only 1,100 tickets after it had been led to believe that 1,400 would be available.

Associate athletic director Craig Keilitz, however, has a different perspective. Keilitz was the one who apparently had “communicated” that there would be 1,400 tickets available.

“When they came up with the 1,400, I don’t know how they came up with that number because I didn’t give them any exact figures,” Keilitz said. “They just asked the question of how many we had, and I gave them a round number, but it was not 1,400.”

Keilitz said that in the past, sports marketing has not made a habit of telling SG how many tickets are available, so he did not have the exact figure ready.

“They’ve never asked and we’ve never told them, it’s just what the numbers come out as,” Keilitz said. “When they called and asked, I told (Goff) what I thought we had available. What I answered was what we had available for the undergraduate students. I don’t know how that was perceived to take how many tickets we had left, and I don’t know what she said.”

What began with a miscommunication only got messier when   there was discussion that the 400 absent tickets had been sold by sports marketing to the general public.

“The biggest thing that upset our athletic director (Ron Wellman) and I is that we took tickets to sell, and that’s just simply not true,” Keilitz said. “If you were at the game, you saw that there was not one single person in that 2,500 that was not a Wake Forest student.”

Keilitz also wanted to stop speculation that sports marketing had not taken the tickets as punishment for the poor attendance at the Virginia game Jan. 31, the day after pledge night.

“The other assertion that was made is that because we had 850 students not show up, we took tickets to punish them, which was a pure fabrication,” Keilitz said. “That never took place.”

According to Keilitz, the exact same minimum amount of student tickets to be allotted, 2,500, has been in place “since the pre-Duncan years.”

This number was not lowered for this ticket distribution, nor are there plans to lower it in the future, Keilitz said.

The mix-up appears to have occurred because of a different allotment of student tickets. This year, there are 837 Screamin’ Demons, who receive guaranteed admittance to every game, as opposed to approximately 650 last year.

Also, 175 tickets were issued to student-athletes this year for the three-game set of UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Cincinnati and Duke, though the previous games this season only had 135 tickets allotted for student-athletes. The student-athletes also received more tickets this year than they have in years past.

With the increase in Screamin’ Demons enrollment and the largest allotment for student-athletes in recent past, students vying for the remainder of the tickets were left with a much smaller pool.

The breakdown of the total 2,500 tickets allotted is as follows: 837 to Screamin’ Demons, 82 to the pep band, 250 to the medical school, 40 to SG and 175 to student athletes. That leaves 1,116 tickets for general distribution.

This was also the first time this season that sports marketing had allotted just the minimum, though certainly not the first time ever.

Because sports marketing allotted more than the minimum of 2,500 tickets for previous games this year, students could not have noticed the increase in Screamin’ Demons and student-athlete tickets.

“Even though the same number of Wake Forest students is receiving tickets, it seemed to be less because the distribution has gone down because other groups have gone up,” Keilitz said. “That’s why when Student Government, as I heard, was saying we took tickets away — we didn’t take tickets away, we distributed differently.”

In a press release, SG said it was “working in conjunction with university administration and the athletic department to correct what Student Government feels to be an unfair allotment of tickets, as well as a blow to the spirit of the university.”

However, while Keilitz was sympathetic towards the students who were unable to get tickets, he suggested that they join Screamin’ Demons for a guaranteed ticket to every game.

Otherwise, the overall number of student seats is not likely to change, because many students want to go to the Duke and UNC games each year instead of attending all match-ups.

“If we have 3,000 Screamin’ Demons that say, ‘I want to make it to every game,’ and are committing to that, we’d have 3,000 tickets,” Keilitz said. “And that’s all you can ask for. We give the opportunity for the students to do that,” he added. “But if we’re only averaging about 1,300 students attending games, per game, we don’t think it’s fair to our alumni, to our basketball team and to our season ticket holders to have more than 2,500 (tickets alloted). That’s simply just not fair.”

He also noted that, despite all the complaints about people not getting tickets, not everyone used their tickets.

“We had about 250 students that picked up tickets (at the campout) for the Carolina game that did not show up,” Keilitz said. “So that was too bad, knowing that many people that really wanted to go to the game did not have an opportunity.”

One thing that nobody would like to happen is for support for the team to decrease as a result of bitter feelings about the campout.

“Our students are catalysts for the atmosphere in there,” Keilitz said. “When our students are not there, the games are nowhere near what they are when they are there. When the students are on top of their game, the atmosphere in there is electrifying.”