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by Chris Korman | Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - 9:47 pm UTC
Who said one fan can’t make a difference?
Indiana graduate student Scott Manning wanted a fuller, more raucous Assembly Hall.
So he wrote a letter.
And it may lead to a change.
Manning, who’s in the fourth year of a five-year accounting program at Indiana, sent a letter to the Indiana athletic department advocating first come, first served seating for the students.
Currently, students are assigned seats and are generally allotted one ticket per season in the lower bleachers, the traditional student section of Assembly Hall. Otherwise, they’re up higher, usually in the balcony.
During recent games the bleachers have been slow to fill up and are often sparse.
Now, Indiana is in the preliminary stages of investigating new ways to distribute tickets.
Manning met with Tim Fitzpatrick and Frank Cuervo Tuesday to discuss the situation.
According to Cuervo, the athletics department plans to speak with a broad range of student groups – from student government to Greeks and randomly picked season ticket holders – to find out how to attract them to games.
So far, only 385 out of about 8,000 students who purchased tickets this year have attended all six home games (including the two exhibitions.)
“I think it’s a pretty reasonable goal for a school like Indiana to have fans who are there early and who are into the game,†Manning said.Â
If people wanted a more raucous Assembly Hall, the athletics department would give all floor seats to IU students. Just give the students all the bleacher seats, but then give the rest of the seats in the Hall to alums. No. 1: Alums don’t cheer until TV timeouts. No. 2: Any arena with an “electric atmosphere (i.e. Cameron Indoor, UI’s Assembly Hall, the Breslin Center) has fewer student seats than IU, but closer student seats. No. 3: Why is the athletics department flocking toward this second-year grad student? Don’t they have any marketing people who can decipher what is best for the IU basketball experience?