Saturday attendance

[HuskyNan]

 

[npignatjr]

This is not necessarily in response to your quote as I was also there and will be there tonight but as my daughter is a student there, she just reported to me that the school has sold 4,000 tickets to students who are returning today from Spring break. That's good but I still fear the 9 PM start time will prevent many of the elder ticket holders from going. I hope I am wrong as I want to see 9,000 screaming fans there. It was a bit disappointing to see UConn ranked as 11th of the 16 host teams in attendance for the 1st round games.

I wonder if pricing, apathy, Spring break all conspire against UConn? While yes, UConn is the top brand in the sport, maybe they do need to rethink the pricing strategy as full houses are preferable to half-full.

I might be considered elder, but will be going tonight alone. My normal partners will not make it tonight. A 5 hour energy all ready to go.

 

[UCBaller2012]

 

[huskiemaniac]

Actually, there weren't a lot of tickets available. If you went through the athletic department site, your choice of tickets was very limited, a few singles in the lower level corners, and what I estimate would be a few hundred in the courtside upper levels, mainly on the bench seating side.

I've been a donor and a season-ticket holder for 10 years now. I learned never to try and get my tickets through UConn. The NCAA runs the show. It dictates that about 1000 of the best prime seats be reserved for the NCAA, Turner, ESPN, participating teams entourages (family and friends of players, band, cheerleaders, etc.). Then each participating team gets an allocation. Therein lies the rub.

Nobody knows until Sunday night where they're going to be playing (except the top seeds who know that they will be hosting). It used to be worse, used to be Monday night. So the allocation goes to Florida, UCF and Mercer. They are only "required" to purchase 100 lower level seats for the first game, and 100 lower level seats if they move on to the second game. However they get an allocation larger than that. I just finished reading this year's host manual. There's no requirement for unsold tickets to be returned to the host site.

I have spoken with various UConn athletic department administrators about this. The excuse had always been that they couldn't get the physical tickets back in time to inventory them, list them, and put them up for sale. That excuse no longer exists with all being digital.

Anyone who was at the game on Saturday saw that the announced crowd of 5000 was probably inflated. The NCAA manual says that they have to announce the attendance based on ticket sales. That literally means that half the tickets were not sold. Yet they appear on no primary or secondary ticket market.

On the UConn site early this morning they had four tickets available in section 223 and 2 in section 2. Those are now gone. On StubHub, there are a total of 193 tickets available. It will be interesting to see what the announced attendance (officially, tickets sold) will be for tonight.

I don't know where those tickets are, but they aren't available.

I have 7 for 3 of us

 

[Bjbod]

That was a second round game.
Success is still relatively new to many teams. That builds first-time excitement. Many UConn fans have been through it and don't feel like making the long trip to Storrs. We were at the game yesterday and enjoyed it. There is nothing like watching a game and developing plays live. Looking forward to being there Monday, too.

FYI, Iowa's 1st round game vs Illinois State was a sell-out as well. Made it 3 games in a row (season finale vs Michigan was the 1st). Capacity for NCAA games limited by ??? Had 15000 for Michigan game. Looked like some seats near the court were removed to make room for more press. Sad the team's performance didn't quite match that of the fans'.