For faculty and staff, paper tickets to Kansas University basketball games have gone away, replaced with a new debit access card.
The athletic department recently sent a letter to all faculty and staff season ticket holders, informing them that starting this season, instead of receiving a stack of tickets in the mail, they would receive an access card, with all their tickets stored electronically.
“This system is the same exact system we’ve used with students for a number of years,” said KU associate athletic director Jim Marchiony. “It greatly reduces the potential for tickets being scalped or otherwise misused.”
That’s been a concern of athletic administrators for years. This winter, in an interview with the Journal-World, Marchiony said scalping of faculty and staff tickets would become a point of emphasis.
But Bill Tuttle, a professor of American Studies, doesn’t see this problem of faculty and staff scalping their tickets.
“I sit in the faculty section, and there are the same faces there game after game,” Tuttle said. “I wonder why there’s a distinction between
faculty tickets and Williams Fund tickets.”
The athletics department says that because faculty and staff tickets cost less than regular season tickets and don’t require a Williams Fund donation, they should not be able to resell them for more than face value.
So, with the help of the University Senate executive committee’s basketball sub-committee, the access-card system was born.
“I don’t know how it’s going to work,” said Susan Twombly, professor of education and chairwoman of the sub-committee. “We’ll have to wait and see. It’s certainly convenient for some people and a lot less expensive (for the athletic department).”
With the access cards, 1,600 faculty and staff with full-season tickets will be able to lend their cards to others if they will not be able to attend a game, or they can go to Allen Fieldhouse and transfer tickets to a new access card. There’s also a system where people can transfer tickets to other people online for $1.50, which will result in an e-mail to be printed out for a paper ticket.
Twombly said while the system isn’t exactly what the basketball committee and the athletic department discussed, most changes came because of the limitations of the ticketing system.
“We agreed with the athletic department to try it out for a year as an experiment,” Twombly said. “They and we will be able to assess the program at the end of the year.”
In addition to faculty and staff, the athletic department also offered the access cards to other season ticket holders. Marchiony said about 200season ticket holders decided to try the cards.
Twombly said the basketball committee and athletics have been consistent all year in telling faculty and staff they would not be receiving paper tickets this year, but she is still expecting to answer a lot of questions from those who missed the communications or don’t understand the process.
“(It’s) going to be difficult for me to decide at 4 p.m. today that I want to give my ticket to a friend,” she said. “I expect it is going to take some working out.”
