UW-Madison students waiting in line outside the Kohl Center for men's basketball season tickets were sent home Friday afternoon when Athletic Department officials discovered 625 electronic applications submitted online by UW-Madison students were not processed by the computer ticketing system.
UW-Madison Associate Athletic Director of Communications Steve Malchow said Sunday the athletic department will be holding a town hall-style meeting today at the Kohl Center at 4:30 p.m., at which time the Athletic Department will present its plan to remedy the ticket fiasco.
In anticipation of the high demand for 2004-'05 season basketball tickets, last May the athletic department and Associated Students of Madison jointly formulated a sales plan that would move ticket requests to the fall instead of the spring, in order to offer more students the opportunity to purchase them.
During the period of Sept. 27 to Oct. 1, students could purchase tickets online at www.uwbadgers.com. Confirmed orders were then entered into a lottery system based on class ranking. The system was designed to allocate a total of 2,000 tickets to students.
It is estimated more than 3,000 students applied for tickets this fall. Confirmation e-mails were sent to all students who applied, including the approximately 2,000 students who received season tickets through the lottery.
Due to the processing error, the excess requests for tickets cannot be met, and the athletic department has suspended the ticketing process.
\It's kind of a bad situation,"" UW-Madison senior and ticket-holder Chad Krueger said. Krueger is in the weighted lottery, and fears his tickets are no longer guaranteed.
""They just need to get their act together and fix it somehow,"" he said.
Another ticket-holder, UW-Madison senior Nick Ruder, explained the concern among student groups who have been following the ticket process closely.
""In my opinion, I don't know how they could redo the lottery,"" he said. ""They have already told 2,000 people they have tickets, and they've already got people waiting in line. Obviously I am not happy.""
Ruder speculated the processing error occurred because the online application ""quantity"" box, preset at 0, was supposed to be changed to 1 in order to register.
""Those 625 people got a confirmation letter, but people who didn't change that number were not, in fact, submitted to the lottery,"" he said. ""Of the 3,000 who applied, only those who changed that number got in the lottery.""
According to Ruder, even grandfathered ticket holders, those who have ordered Badger tickets three years or more, are no longer ensured tickets if their orders were processed incorrectly.
Since the athletic department needed to reassess ticket distribution, UW-Madison students have brainstormed possible solutions, such as a second lottery or split-season ticket sharing.
A forum for opinion sharing and debate can be found online at www.uwbadgers.com. Students wishing to attend today's meeting at the Kohl Center should enter at Gate B.
