Athletics issues related to this past Saturday’s football game played a prominent role at Wednesday’s Student Senate meeting.
The Senate unanimously passed a resolution urging the SEC to formalize its policy concerning reserved visitor seating.
The resolution follows the LSU-Alabama football matchup, where many visiting LSU students had seats in the stadium’s upper deck.
The resolution, authored by Senate Speaker Colorado Robertson, requests that SEC Commissioner Michael Slive “develop and implement a consistent guest ticket policy for regular season conference games.” The resolution also calls for a minimum of 500 student tickets in the lower section.
“We’re going to urge the commissioner of the SEC to change the policy,” Robertson said. “We want to stipulate that there is a minimum ticket requirement and placement for teams.”
SG Director of Athletics Dixon McMakin said the current ticket allocation practice is a trend across the SEC. While visitor seats were traditionally reserved in the lower bowl, universities began shifting guest spots to their newly constructed upper decks. McMakin noted that LSU is one of the universities that pioneered this trend.
“Alabama is the worst team in the SEC at providing lower-bowl seats to visitors,” McMakin said.
Alabama, like other SEC universities, offers 7,000 guest seats. Of those, 5,500 are on the upper deck and only 1,500 are in the lower bowl.
LSU splits its seats evenly: 3,500 in the bowl and on the deck. Some SEC schools have as many as 3,800 lower bowl seats.
Robertson said he has met with and has the support of both Senior Associate Athletic Director Herb Vincent and Director of Ticket Operations Brian Broussard. Robertson said he has also contacted other student leaders within the SEC who agree with him.
McMakin said students may meet with the Athletic Department after football season comes to an end to discuss any outstanding problems.
Later in the meeting, the Senate allocated $2,000, split evenly between four speech, language and pathology graduate students, to defray their costs to attend the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in Boston.
“I don’t think anybody could have been more helpful,” said Trista Laporte, one of the traveling students.
The Senate passed two additional resolutions. The first requests that the Office of Parking, Traffic and Transportation place scheduling signs at all campus bus stops. The second urges that the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Council endorse the One Baton Rouge proposal, which would formalize the city-parish’s “commitment to diversity and equal opportunity.”
—-Contact Daniel McBride at [email protected]