North Carolina State University Athletics
COUNTDOWN TO KICKOFF: Ticket Office
8/30/2005 12:00:00 AM | Football
Aug. 30, 2005
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH -- Dick Christy remembers the spring of his first season as part of the NC State ticket office.
"It was like crickets in here, it was so quiet," Christy says of April, 2000.
Things heated up pretty quickly afterwards, however, as the excitement from the hiring of football coach Chuck Amato began to swell. By the time the Wolfpack took the field in the fall, with the debut of a freshman quarterback named Philip Rivers, every season ticket was sold.
It's been that way ever since, and the science of selling and distributing season tickets for football and men's basketball has gotten increasingly more complicated, even as the process for producing the 36,500 or so season tickets has gotten more technologically advanced, thanks to a greater reliance on on-line applications, hand-held ticket scanners and other new technologies that are becoming the standard at sports venues around the country.
And Sunday, when the Wolfpack kicks off its sixth season under Amato against defending ACC-champion Virginia Tech at Cater-Finely Stadium, demand for tickets has never been greater.
So these are the hardest days for Christy, the Assistant Athletics Director for External Affairs who oversees the increasingly busy ticket office.
The grandson of the legendary Wolfpack All-America halfback by the same name, Christy came to NC State from Wingate University, where he was a student-athlete on the men's golf team. He recently received a masters degree in Parks, Recreation and Tourism, and has slowly been taking on some of the responsibilities of former Associate Athletics Director Charlie Cobb, who left in July to become the Athletics Director at Appalachian State.
"There used to be a lot of dead time in the ticket office before we moved from Reynolds Coliseum to the RBC Center, since basketball would be sold-out early and football really didn't get kicked off until June," Christy said. "Then, with the success we have had in football and basketball coinciding with the expansion and changes in Carter-Finley, it has become very demanding on our staff.
"As demand crept up, things started getting crazier. The dates for renewals and ticket applications got earlier and earlier. The time to stuff all the tickets took longer and longer. We had to come up with a timeline, so we knew when to do what as the year went along."
The process for renewing and selling tickets for football season began in January when Christy and Cobb sat down to talk about exactly how many season tickets would be available for this season, as some 1,900 new seats are added with the addition of Vaughn Towers. They had to review the schedule, set the ticket prices and come up with the brochures that are sent out to previous ticket holders and Wolfpack Club members.
The on-line application went up on March 1, with paper applications mailed out about three weeks later. About 30 percent of all applications were processed on-line this year, a number Christy hopes will increase to at least 50 percent next year.
After the May 15 application deadline, the ticket office staff -- which includes Director of Ticket Operations Brian Kelly, Assistant Ticket Manager Anna Whitehurst, graduate assistant Colin Hargis and a half-dozen interns; there are also two full-time employees of the Wolfpack Club, Eric Batts and Ian Hooper, who do nothing but handle tickets and parking - spent the bulk of their time assigning ticket requests and parking passes. Parking, which based on a Wolfpack Club priority system, is always a contentious issue, and causes nearly all complaints, Christy said, now that season tickets are more or less locked down by Lifetime Seating Rights.
"I think what people are most passionate about is where their parking spot is, there really isn't a bad seat in Carter-Finley" Christy said.
In June, the corps of six interns -- which includes Wolfpack volleyball player Kristin Fowler, as well as NC State students Mark Banks, Kyle Swicegood, Josh Rainer, Travis Tuckey and Nick Rushing; three others, Luke Evans, Anthony DeBoard and Marie Brown, are from other schools -- begins the arduous task of taking the 6,000 pages of computer printouts with Wolfpack Club account numbers and priority ranks and matching them with the seats.
In July, they began stuffing the approximately 10,000 envelopes with tickets and information printouts to send out to season-ticket holders by Aug. 1. That's no easy task, since any mistake in the mailing exponentially increases the headaches as game day approaches.
The first two weeks of August are devoted to handling answering phone calls, addressing complaints and fixing any mistakes. These final two weeks have been devoted to getting Virginia Tech's tickets in the mail, making sure all the gates at Carter-Finley are ready and training everyone in the office about their game-day responsibilities.
"The interns are really dying to get to the season to see the product of all that work they are doing," Christy said. "That's one of the things we stress to them: Take pride when you get there for that first game, there is not an empty seat in the house because that is the product of all your work."
The ticket office has also been busy working with NC State Student Affairs and Public Safety to implement an on-line distribution system for students. In other words, there is no more waiting outside of Reynolds Coliseum in long lines waiting for game tickets.
Students can now request tickets through an on-line lottery, wait for an e-mail to for confirmation and print out the ticket from their personal printer. Among other things, such as security and protection against forgery, the ticket office will be able to chart whether a student uses a ticket. Students have until noon Friday before a game to cancel the on-line ticket. The first time a student fails to use a ticket, that information is recorded on their account. After the second time of failing to use a ticket, the student is prohibited from requesting tickets for the rest of the season.
As game day approaches, Christy and his staff know there could potentially be more headaches to come. There will be full-time staffers and interns manning the gates Sunday afternoon to handle any problems that may crop up among the 100 or so event staff personnel who will scan and stub tickets at various gates.
They each have a check-list that has been developed over the last five years to make sure nothing is over looked. Inevitably, however, there may be some problems that will have to be addressed by a member of the ticket office staff.
And that's why there is a debriefing meeting scheduled for Tuesday after the game, not just to review but to continue improving for the future.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
