Despite problems, tickets sell out in two hours

Thousands of UA students arose in the early hours of Tuesday morning to order tickets for the 2008 football season. Some, however, found a multitude of technical difficulties with the system, preventing purchase before they sold out in a mere two hours.

"I think that when you have literally thousands and thousands of students logging on to the same program at the same time, there is bound to be issues. I just think we, as students, didn't realize how great the demand was in that short amount of time," said Vice President for Student Affairs Louise Crow.

Crow, who has met often with athletics officials about next season's paperless tickets, was one of many students not able to purchase tickets.

"It's fair game. It's just the luck of the draw. I know I had that risk going into it," she said.

UA spokeswoman Debbie Lane said reviews of the system tended to be mixed based on whether students received tickets or not.

"I think it went well for the 11,000 students who got the tickets; it was probably very frustrating for students who were not," Lane said.

SGA President Cason Kirby acknowledged the problems Tuesday morning, but said it comes with any new system, and they would be resolved as soon as they could.

"I think we're always going to see a few kinks the first time you use a new system, but I think this system is going to be of a lot of benefit to students," Kirby said. "I think the technical issues will definitely be resolved. Sometimes it's a difficult transition into a new system the first year."

Some students, like Alex Supinski, a freshman majoring in education, complained to the athletics office about the problems, but said he was told to call the SGA, which does not run the technical operation of ticket sales.

"I go enter in my information and it asks for my CWID," Supinski said. "I type it in and it says 'account already registered, try another.' I called up and was on hold for 30 minutes when I get disconnected. I called again and asked what was going on and they told me they would be referring me to the student eligibility thing, and when I called it was the SGA office."

SGA officials confirmed they received calls throughout the day from people referred to them by the ticket office.

"I am really not sure why they routed calls to us, but we had both technical calls, as well as complaints from students and parents all day. I know the athletic office told them to call us, and we presented them with all the information we had," Kirby said.

Calls to the UA Athletic Department by The Crimson White were not returned by press time, and UA Media Relations also could not get comment on the deferment of complaints to the SGA.

The UA Athletic Department did verify through UA Media Relations that some graduate students had away game orders messed up due to a problem with the transferring of credit hours from the registrar's office to the athletic department.

"Some credit hours for some graduate students did not transfer properly during the upload process," an athletic department official said.

Students who are upset at the way the University handled the ticket situation are protesting today outside the Mal Moore Athletic Facility starting at 7 a.m.

"They only give out 11,000 tickets and there are 20-something thousand students," said Ellis Axson, a freshman majoring in finance.

Axson was one of the students organizing the protest.

"It's ridiculous. I pay $30,000 to go here from out of state and it sounds bad, but most [of] the reason I came was for football."

Axson said he hopes there is a good turnout for the protest.

"Hopefully at least 50, we have two news stations that will be there," he said.

Crow said the student ticket pool would help alleviate the problem of students who did not get tickets.

"One thing we would also like to arrange that for students that were fortunate enough to purchase tickets and can't go to the game to put the tickets in the student ticket pool," she said.