Tiger Stadium on a Saturday night is often referred to as a party with “90,000 of your closest friends.”
But some students opposed to the changes to student ticket policies said they now feel divorced from the rest of the LSU fanbase.
“It really has kind of diminished the sense of community that we had felt,” said Rusty Ware, full-time graduate student in kinesiology.
Ware said he attended all the Tigers’ 2007 home games with his wife, Amy Ware, an administrative program specialist for the Office of the University Registrar.
But because spouse tickets are not available this football season, Rusty said he and Amy will be watching from home.
“I’ve been an LSU fan since I started my undergrad in college,” he said. “So to have this taken away when I finally made the decision to come here has been very disappointing.”
While Rusty is still able to purchase a student ticket, Amy is not, and the couple feels left without any reasonable alternatives, Rusty said.
“The option was look for upgrades, look for the opportunity to get a ticket that could be upgraded and then your wife can sit with you in the student section,” Rusty said administrators told him. “There was no discussion of opportunities to buy season tickets even at a more expensive price than a student ticket – assuming you wanted to pay a premium to actually sit together.”
LSU Ticket Manager Brian Broussard said the Wares have an advantage over other fans looking for upgrades because they already know they’re looking for tickets.
“We will reach the [500 upgrades per game] limit, but it won’t happen overnight,” Broussard said. “There’s ample time for students to take advantage of the upgrade. If that’s what you plan, plan ahead and get the ticket upgrade as soon as you can.”
Rusty Ware said he didn’t want to take that chance. In addition, no upgrades are available for home games against Alabama and Georgia – which both Broussard and the Wares agreed are the two biggest home games of the season.
While the magnitude of the Alabama and Georgia games may make them two of the more desirable games for the Wares to attend, Broussard said the importance of those games makes them the games full-time students most deserve to attend before other fans.
“The reason why the Alabama and Georgia games were selected is that the demand is so high from the student body for full-time students that there’s no reason why anyone outside the student body should be allowed in,” Broussard said. “There’s no exceptions there.”
Katy Herring, psychology senior, said she opposes the lack of guest upgrades for the Alabama and Georgia matchups.
“We all have friends who go to BRCC and hope to transfer to LSU or who just live in the area and enjoy the games,” Herring said. “I realize it’s only two games they’re excluding, but those are the two biggest games that everybody’s going to want to come to. And they’re going to be excluding a lot of fans from that.”
Herring said LSU’s fanbase stretches much further than just the student body.
“You don’t have to go to LSU to be a big fan,” she said. “A lot of people are going to miss out on this upcoming season just because they don’t go here.”
The problem isn’t that freshmen shouldn’t get a chance to buy tickets before non-student fans, Herring said, but that the student section is not large enough to encompass everyone she thinks it should.
“Freshmen should have the opportunity to buy tickets because they’re coming here and supporting the University with their tuition and fees,” Herring said. “There’s just not enough seats to go around. That’s the major issue that needs to be addressed. There needs to be more seats so that everyone that wants to come can come.”
The student section cannot be expanded right now, Broussard said, and would not even be a feasible plan.
“There’s no possibility of that at this point in time,” Broussard said. “We’re talking for two games. It’s a very slippery slope you can get on when for one or two games the student body has a very high attendance rate and for some other games in the year there’s 6,000 no-shows. We can’t change the student-section size game-by-game, so we’ve come to a compromise.”
With all the debate about the changes for this season, Rusty Ware said one of his biggest issues is with the lack of student input prior to the decision to make the changes.
“Apparently this policy is something that is reviewed between the Athletic Department and Student Government, and it was supposedly an open forum,” Ware said. “To my knowledge, it was not widely publicized as something that would typically be of significant importance to most of the students. The problem was it was not publicized, so it seems like the decision was made in a vacuum.”
Broussard said the forum was not something put together by the ticket office or Athletic Department and that he did remember it being reported in The Daily Reveille.
“During the spring, Student Government put together a day where we were out there discussing the ticket plans,” Broussard said. “It was in the Reveille. But Student Government set it all up, so [Ware] can address his concerns to the Student Government.”
—-Contact Jerit Roser at [email protected]