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Friday, March 03, 2006
The truth about tickets
When tickets for the Bucknell pod sold out in a matter of a few hours in Lewisburg, the message boards and rumor mills shifted into high gear with complaints about botched handling of the sale by the Bucknell box office.

Chief among the complaints was the fact that no limit was placed on how many tickets an individual could purchase.

That was true, there was no limit. But Bucknell officials say there was no widespread abuse as had been reported in some circles. One story that seemed to gain legs was a report that someone in line witnessed a person in front of them buying a block of 100 tickets. Adding fuel to that fire was the report that it was a "townie", not a student who bought them.

Bucknell athletic department officials heard those reports and conducted an audit of the sales. That check found that the largest single purchase of tickets was 24. And while they were not bought by students, they actually were bought by someone from the campus community.

According to Tim Pavlechko, an assistant A.D. at Bucknell, the 24 tickets were bought by a secretary from one department on campus, with money pooled by the professors, who had to teach class when the tickets went on sale.

Pavlechko said beyond that, most of the larger purchases were groups of eight, bought by students in similar situations.

There was no limit for a couple of reasons, the biggest of which being that there had never been a demand for early round tickets like there was at Bucknell this year. Also, the league has no guidelines in place, and technically, the ticket sales are uner the league's control.

That is also why tickets are not free to students and staff as they are in the regular season at Bucknell. They are simply not Bucknell's tickets to give away, although the school did purchase 800 at face value to give away to its students. Those were distributed in a random drawing.

Those who got froze out on Monday had a chance to get tickets this afternoon when about 300 that were returned from the other three schools in the Bucknell pod were placed on sale.

While nobody camped out to get them, by 3:30, a half hour before the box office opened, there was already a line stretching across the front of Sojka Pavilion.
Published at 4:55 PM by Hoop Time.
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