The toughest ticket in town just got tougher because of a decision by the Mississippi State athletics department that ignored suggestions from the Student Association, university officials and other student groups on campus.
This semester the university collaborated with the Student Association to sell 1,000 student season tickets Tuesday and Wednesday, Student Association President Adam Telle said. According to the plan, basketball fan group Rick’s Rowdies was supposed to get 700, and the rest of the student body 300.
Instead, 2000 tickets were sold. There are 1,200 left.
The remaining tickets will be divvied out on a first-come-first-serve basis on Monday mornings before basketball games, as was the custom in previous seasons.
According to the SA’s plan, the only students on campus that were supposed to have access to the season tickets Tuesday were paid members of Rick’s Rowdies.
Word leaked Tuesday that the ticket office was not checking if students were paid members of Rick’s Rowdies. Other students lined up and got tickets. Athletic director Larry Templeton said the department upped the amount it sold that day to 950. At the end of Tuesday, 286 Rowdies had been turned away, Rowdies Co-president Casey Combes said.
Tickets were supposed to be reserved for more than 700 Rowdies who were on a list compiled by the Student Association. No tickets were reserved though.
“I was in Larry Templeton’s office on Friday around 11 a.m. and I offered him a list,” Telle said. “They (Templeton and associate athletics director for internal opperations Duncan McKenzie) said, ‘We don’t need that.’ I said, ‘I am going to give it to you because I am going to feel better if I give it to you. Maybe you won’t use it, but here it is, so I can say I gave it to you.’ Duncan McKenzie put it in his hand.”
“I never saw a list on Friday,” Templeton said. “You’d have to ask Duncan. We saw the list Tuesday.”
McKenzie’s secretary said he could not be interviewed Thursday.
The list that Telle said he submitted to McKenzie Friday had 700 names on it. Templeton, who could not give an exact number of how many were on the list or say where the list is now, said that the number on the list was larger than the department originally agreed on at an Oct. 27 athletic counsel meeting.
“We wanted to limit the number of tickets to 25 to 33 percent (of the 3,200 available for students),” said Caleb Butts, SA director of athletic support. “We didn’t want it to be wide open and there be empty seats because if the athletic department sees empty seats, they might sell them to alumni.”
“The ladies in the ticket office may not have had the list, but the associate athletic director in charge should have had the list,” Combes said. “We would have done anything they asked. I would have stood there with a list and marked people off Tuesday. They didn’t meet us halfway.”
Combes said she received 50 phone calls and 30 e-mails about the ticket situation Tuesday.
“Rick’s Rowdies never guaranteed our members a ticket until Friday, when we were told by the athletic department that we had 700 tickets,” Combes said.
Combes said this guarantee came during a phone conversation between Stansbury and the athletic department during the Friday morning meeting.
“Last week I was told the Rick’s Rowdies would get their tickets Tuesday and all other students Wednesday,” Stansbury said from Birmingham, Ala., Thursday.
The athletic department originally had 800 tickets printed in booklets, despite Telle’s requests to up the amount to 1,000.
Tuesday night, after selling 950 tickets, Templeton decided the department would sell 1,000 more starting at 1 p.m. Wednesday.
“We had told those kids we were going to (sell tickets) on Wednesday,” Templeton said. “I made the decision to do another 1,000 trying to be fair.”
That meant that ticket workers had to package the tickets that night.
Pat Wallace, assistant athletics director for ticket operations, said she was not involved in the decision and reverted all other comments to McKenzie.
“I think a lot of students are upset with Adam and the Student Association. The Student Association gave us the input, but they don’t make the decisions,” Templeton said. “We changed some of those decisions as we went in trying to be fair.
“Our athletic department is accepting all the blame, but there are 2,000 kids that have tickets now and won’t have to camp out every Monday,” he added.
However, students who did not get a set of tickets will have to follow the traditional procedure of getting a ticket for a Wednesday game the Monday morning before.
Templeton said the decision was not an issue of money and that the $40,000 from the sales will go into the regular ticket revenue fund.
Stansbury pledged to get the rest of the Rowdies their tickets. “I am totally against the way this came out,” he said.