OKLAHOMA CITY ? The Kansas University-Oklahoma State softball game scheduled for Thursday afternoon was postponed due to heavy thunderstorms and marble-sized hail.
The No. 7-seeded Jayhawks and No. 6 Cowgirls will meet at 10 this morning at the ASA Hall of Fame Stadium.
The winner of the KU-OSU game will face the loser of the Oklahoma-Nebraska game at 5:30 p.m. today.
No more tickets remain for the Big 12 Conference men’s basketball tournament. League officials declared Wednesday that the March 13-16 tourney at American Airlines Center in Dallas is a sellout.
Big 12 schools will receive the bulk of the ticket allotment for the 19,100-seat facility. Each school, including Kansas University, will receive approximately 1,100 tickets.
“We took our full allotment, although I understand some schools didn’t,” said Richard Konzem, KU senior associate athletic director.
The first six Big 12 Tournaments were at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Mo., where KU fans were usually in the majority because they bought tickets through the Big 12 office.
With the tourney shifting to Dallas, fewer public tickets were made available because of options offered to American Airlines Center suite holders and to corporate sponsors. Only about 500 tickets were offered to the public. They were placed on sale Wednesday morning and were sold in 20 minutes, league officials said.
Of the 1,100 tickets taken by Kansas, 15 percent will be made available to students and 10 percent to faculty and staff. Konzem said it wasn’t likely with the tournament being in Dallas that students and faculty-staff would fill those quotas, meaning more donors will likely have the opportunity to buy them.
“Last year you had to be in the Williams Fund $5,000 club,” Konzem said. “This year I think we’ll be able to take care of people in lower levels of giving.”
Geography isn’t the only factor in determining interest by Kansas fans in the league tournament. So is length.
“The tournament has six sessions,” Konzem said, “and KU has never played in more than three of them.”
Day and night sessions are scheduled Thursday, March 13, and Friday, March 14, with day sessions Saturday, March 15, and Sunday, March 16. Seeds 5 through 12 will play on the first day. Kansas has been at least a No. 4 seed in five of the six previous meets.
The tourney will be back in the American Airlines Center in 2004, then return to Kansas City in 2005. Sites for 2006 and beyond haven’t been determined.