Students trapped in the heat and massive lines outside Tiger Stadium last Saturday don’t need to worry for this week’s game – the new system that caused hour-long delays has been changed, according to Student Government President John Woodard, who attended a meeting with LSU Athletics representatives this week.
The Athletics Department instituted a new system for organizing student entry into Tiger Stadium for last week’s game against UAB, assembling entrants into a single, “Disney-style” line.
For this Saturday’s game, lines will revert to the “chute-style” system used in the past, splitting the crowd into eight lines that lead directly toward ticket and ID scanners, Woodard said.
Each line will also feature a bag check, which Woodard said would fix another problem that came up before the game last week.
“If a girl had a purse and got into the wrong line, she’d then have to backtrack and wait all that time to get into another one,” Woodard said.
Last week’s experiment with a new line system caused discontent among students and others attending the game.
Elementary education freshman Corinna Cherrier said had the game not been delayed by a lightning storm, she and her friends would have missed the kickoff.
“I consider myself a pretty patient person, but I definitely had friends who were freaking out and I had to keep telling them, ‘calm down, calm down,’” Cherrier said.
Woodard said the problem was that Athletics did not consult with anyone else before implementing the change.
“I just don’t think they foresaw any problems,” Woodard said. “Looking back, I’m sure they wish they had asked someone – I think law enforcement would have been able to give them something,” Woodard said.