Tickets sold out within the first minute for the highly anticipated Quinnipiac-Yale hockey game last Friday.
At 10 p.m. exactly, 891 students clicked the link Quinnipiac’s Athletic Department provided in an e-mail. There were 1,500 submissions by 10:01, according to Eric Grgurich, executive director of the TD Bank Sports Center.
Athletics then e-mailed the first 1,000 students that qualified for a ticket.
“The demand was so much higher than we could have expected,” Grgurich said. “We felt the only fair way for everyone to have an opportunity to get a ticket was to do this like an on-sale event, just like how the Red Sox, Yankees, or a major concert would do.”
Sophomore Megan Palladino felt the game could not be experienced with a group of friends when there was no way to know who got a ticket.
“If you blinked, you missed it,” Palladino said. “Whole groups of friends want to go together, and then certain people don’t get them. You want to go as a whole group and share that with your close friends.”
In previous years, students had to wait in line to receive their ticket. Last year, the athletics department distributed the tickets from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the Mount Carmel campus.
“We didn’t think it would be fair to distribute tickets during the day because there would be a large number of students who would be in class,” Grgurich said. “We also thought that doing this online would be more feasible than having students wait in a long line, only to realize that all the tickets had been exhausted.”
Grgurich said he always received a flood of e-mails from students who had class conflicts during the time they were distributing tickets, especially students at North Haven who are at an even bigger disadvantage because they are there all day.
Before Athletics sent the e-mail to inform the student body how to reserve tickets, 320 students purchased tickets at the box office for the Yale game, Grgurich said.
Athletics used Neulion ticketing software, a website provider used by other NCAA programs as well as the NFL, NHL and MLS. A time-stamped submission was printed out that listed the individuals and what time they entered their information.
This year’s ticketing method gave every student a chance because if students were not able to wait in line for their ticket, it gave them another option.
Sophomore Jenna Cox was displeased with both options, and suggests another.
“I feel like maybe they should try dispersing them by seniority,” Cox said. “At this rate, we could go here for all four years and not be able to go to a Yale game.”
Photo credit: Ilya Spektor
