I don't really pay much attention to it since I'm not a student but it seems like there's been more issues since they made student tickets general admission (to certain sections). It wasn't as noticeable in the last couple of years because quite frankly, we've been bad and thus the crowds were smaller. But a year with no fans made the demand for seeing a football game grow (whether our record is bad or not) so those issues grow as more people are there. They should probably just go back to assigned seating instead of general admission like it is for everyone. You still have designated student sections, but if you're East Stands, it means East Stands. Not fighting your way into an overcrowded North End Zone. Or your section in East Stands means that assigned seat, not the one with the best view or crowding into a neighboring section because a seat is open because paying customers are late arriving because they're getting food and missed kickoff.
I don't remember these issues when I was a student (mid to late 00s). There was crowds, especially if you waited until the last minute to get into the game, but not the log jams we're seeing now getting into the gates where its a non-moving mass. You could also enter thru just about any gate at the time too, not designated gates so maybe they should go back to that as well. You'd get students trying to get into certain sections, but not the degree you're seeing now of students trying to pack into the best seats available. Students would try to sneak into NEZ, but the stadium staff typically did a good job of enforcement. You might make it in for Sandman in a mad rush, but it won't be long before a worker and security would start rounding up people that pushed thru. Basically, if you were within a row or two of your assigned seat, there were no issues. And if someone said "Hey, that's my seat", everyone just moved over and it was fine.
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They need to develop a system where the wristbands are given out during the week on a first come, first serve basis instead of at the gate. Other schools do this where students will camp out in line to get the best tickets. This way you still get the intended benefit of general admission where the students who really want to be there are putting in some effort and getting the prime seats and not leaving after the first quarter, but you avoid or at least reduce the madhouse and confusion at the gates we've seen.
Maybe need to start doing wristbands for East as well and funnel any students without a wristband into South when they're gone.
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When I was a student (2007-14... not a doctor) students were required to collect their tickets from Cassel if they won the lottery. We could send one person with Hokie Ps and emails to collect a group of tickets so that friends could sit together. If you didn't come by within the allotted window (multiple days) they then opened up tickets to the waiting list of students.
Definitely feel like they should consider going back to this route and simply give the first 200 students the NEZ seats and the rest assigned seats in East Stands.
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Its all eTickets now though so this wouldn't work. Unless you did some online queue but that doesn't really take any actual effort to get in first and likely just causes IT headaches with all the people hitting one endpoint at the same time,
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My freshman year ('01) we literally camped for days in the field between Pritchard and AJ just to get mystery seat lottery tickets. My hall did it as a group so we would always have two people on shift
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I was doing this a couple years before, but yeah - this is how it used to be. I remember a rotating cast of my friends keeping our spot in line for at least 2 days before the '99 Miami tickets were released. Not only was that a fun time, but it absolutely ensured the dedicated and/or smart fans got priority... they changed that up a few years later when we had the option at the beginning of the year to get the tickets upfront, but at an additional cost. Why isn't that done any longer? The shitshow we've seen for the UNC and ND games are enough to revisit the practice.
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Freshman in 01 as well and remember waiting for the Miami game. We took shifts of about two hours. I believe mine was midnight to 2 am. Once they changed to lottery, everything went south. I remember people would just sign up for tickets in order to sell them or decide later whether or not they wanted to show up.
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I was also a freshman in 01 and remember camping out for tickets and taking shifts. This was all before everyone had a cell phone so if someone didn't show up to relieve you from your shift you were stuck making a tough decision on leaving line or sticking it out. I missed a few classes to stay in line but never missed a game that year.
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I hated waiting for tickets, camping out for a week trying to coordinate friends to relieve you do you could go to class. It was a mess season tickets were amazing when introduced.
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If students are caught throwing beers, they should be banned for life.
I understand that even well-staffed security is going to be generally at the mercy of the mob here but also why are you selling beer to the general public in anything that's throw-able? Pour the beers into cups.
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I don't want this to turn into a political discussion but I don't think the students are any more rowdy than times past. I think this has more to do with the 'let's go Brandon' chants than anything else.
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I understand the reference, but I still don't get what goodbadugly is trying to imply there. In any case, even though I haven't been to a game this season, it sounds like a lot of people are saying that the crowds have been rowdier than normal this year. That is, I kind of doubt the university is overreacting here.
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I think this has everything to do with the fact that dealing with the Students General Admission processes has been a shitshow this season, and now has a spotlight on it because of some videos that went viral from the ND game. Between that and students basically going wherever they wanted for the UNC game, often causing issues with season ticket holders, yeah.... Something needed to be done.
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The best, and virtually only option (and it may have been you who brought it up in another thread) is to expand the NEZ and make that purely students. Idk what the capacity of that section is (3,000?)...but make it 10-15,000 and overhaul the rest of the stadium (single seats instead of bleachers, like UL) to accommodate the rest of the ticket demand and leave it at that. Ohio State has it down in that realm.
And to beat the "the soil is bad" crowd...as a grading contractor, that is easily fixable. To beat the "not enough room" crowd...that is also fixable. To beat the "we lack the funds to pull that off" crowd...I do not have that answer.
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It was bad. I had 10 tickets and the parties split up from my season tix and the singles. Sec 5 and 9 just below the 25 and 29 ramps so we always go in there and go down. My party in 5 got smashed into walls by the herd and have bruises to show for it. I'm a well built 6' 230lb and was able to play full back to get my party through in 9. Was crazy bad.
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Unbelievable to kick people out that want to support the school and team IMO. There are empty seats every game, they should just be glad people want to keep showing up at this point
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Every student should have a ticket to the game, period. No ifs, ands or buts. They are the future of the Hokie Club. It's my understanding that the online ticket situation has made it much more difficult to get into Lane. Stop doing online tickets. Make paper an option and make getting into the stadium as easy and quick as possible. Don't sell beer in bottles. Pour them in cups. This isn't difficult but it seems like every decision around our football team is somehow difficult.
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No, it doesn't. But if I'm the Athletic Department, I'm all about mitigating risk and not sticking my head in the sand because we used to have "Hokies Respect" campaign. If there is alcohol involved and alcohol now available in the stadium, there is no doubt that at some point, college kids will get drunk, start a fight or do some dumb shit, and throw a beer bottle. It will happen. I can't believe they serve beers in bottles. At the least, it should be those aluminum bottles.
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Don't understand how online tickets make it more difficult. If anything it makes it easier for a student, as you don't have to find a printer. I found myself trying to get to a printer many a gameday (more often for basketball, but still)
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Just spitballing a theory here but my guess is online tickets make it more difficult because they're scanned and people don't have them ready. So that's a lot of time lost to scan and wait while people (usually drunk) fumble around their phone trying to load up their ticket. It may only be a few seconds, but a few seconds can add up over the course of thousands of people.
With paper, it may have to be scanned but you basically have it ready. And even before the days of scanning, the gatekeepers were trained to know what actual tickets look like so it's actually could be a tiny bit faster for them to visually give it the ok than it is to scan it. Again, we're talking minimal time in seconds but over the course of a full crowd, it adds up.
There's things they could do to speed things up for sure with the current system. But I sorta lean the "old school" way is better for this kind of situation. I'm in no ways a luddite, but there are some things in life that aren't really improved that much by newer technologies. This might be one of them
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The only difference is that you pull up the barcode, or QR code on your phone instead of a piece of paper. It's the same process at the scanner. It's true that if someone doesn't have their ticket downloaded they'll have problems, but at least it's solvable now as opposed to the paper tickets where you have no recourse.
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Im a fan of GA seating in the interest of getting more dedicated students into the stadium and in seats they want to be. Way too often in my time at VT (2009-2014) you would have people winning the lottery but then not going to the game even after picking up the tickets. I also like limiting North so you dont have other empty parts of the stadium. I would have hoped students would be mature enough to handle not being absolute assholes to each other.
As for the fights and thrown items... that makes me so ashamed to be a Hokie. We had an entire thread talking about the safety of going to WVU. Well... WVU sounds like a safer stadium these days.
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The problem (as I see it, so you're getting what you pay for here) is that we have too many moving parts and there are too many simultaneous issues. When you think about it, only our current senior class has had one year of the "normal" college experience. There's a lot of pent-up energy among the students that is coming out in bad ways. Student conduct referrals are up, sexual assault reports are coming in multiples per week, etc. The entire campus community is under strain from all of that. Couple it with new seating policies (on its own, I love the general admission idea but it's got its challenges), beer sales (also doable on its own but there seem to be a LOT of logistical problems), mobile ticketing (you can tell everyone to download the tickets in advance but they're not going to and the crap cell service doesn't help), and pandemic-related staffing issues for security. It's all one big dumpster fire. So VT is trying to solve one thing at a time and having limited success. We will see how the latest plan goes but I also know of some really atrocious student behavior that never would have happened when I was a student. I was in some crazy student sections, but we weren't assholes to each other. We had a code of conduct. A lot of that is gone because so many of our students have no idea what "normal" game day behavior is.
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When you keep an enormous mob of drunk 20 year olds packed in like sardines for an hour, with their health at risk from stampeding and such, some of them are gonna act out, especially those without tickets.
I'm glad that the university seems to be concerned about the few idiots throwing things and all, but I'm extremely disappointed in their refusal to do anything of substance to make entry safer (i.e. more points of entry). If people had died in a stampede last week (people were legitimately passing out and being trampled), it seems the university would have just said "oh well, it's just dumb students." They taking the concerns of non-students seriously (kids without tickets stealing reserved seats), but they don't seem to take the concerns of the students seriously.
I have friends (fellow grad students) who are not gonna go to the game tomorow because last week was such a shitshow and they felt unsafe. I wish VT took our concerns seriously...
I went to 4 years of VT football games as an undergrad and student entry was never a major problem. I think the changes in entry policy directly correlates to the change in results that we've seen this year.
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I am pretty old fashion (and never developed a taste for beer) but I saw trouble coming with the sale of alcohol at games.
To be fair, it is not clear to me that the trouble started before folks started drinking stadium purchased alcohol or after they started drinking stadium purchased alcohol. In any case, bottles and / or cans are definitely NOT the wisest choice for stadium crowds.
I know tailgaters, for example, might have been drinking for several hours before the game ever starts. Letting folks buy even more once they are in the stadium seems to me to be like using a burning match to see if there is any gas in the tank, i.e., a REALLY bad idea.
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I'll just leave it plain and simple- not wanting to get into "rules analysis". I am perceiving this as an alumni as anti student mentality from the university and is just completely unacceptable to me.
Let me ask you- do you think they are good at alumni engagement (both current and future?)
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Comments
the best way to limit students in Lane is to continue losing. Maybe we should take Fuente off crowd control duties?
this is completely TIC, btw
I don't really pay much attention to it since I'm not a student but it seems like there's been more issues since they made student tickets general admission (to certain sections). It wasn't as noticeable in the last couple of years because quite frankly, we've been bad and thus the crowds were smaller. But a year with no fans made the demand for seeing a football game grow (whether our record is bad or not) so those issues grow as more people are there. They should probably just go back to assigned seating instead of general admission like it is for everyone. You still have designated student sections, but if you're East Stands, it means East Stands. Not fighting your way into an overcrowded North End Zone. Or your section in East Stands means that assigned seat, not the one with the best view or crowding into a neighboring section because a seat is open because paying customers are late arriving because they're getting food and missed kickoff.
I don't remember these issues when I was a student (mid to late 00s). There was crowds, especially if you waited until the last minute to get into the game, but not the log jams we're seeing now getting into the gates where its a non-moving mass. You could also enter thru just about any gate at the time too, not designated gates so maybe they should go back to that as well. You'd get students trying to get into certain sections, but not the degree you're seeing now of students trying to pack into the best seats available. Students would try to sneak into NEZ, but the stadium staff typically did a good job of enforcement. You might make it in for Sandman in a mad rush, but it won't be long before a worker and security would start rounding up people that pushed thru. Basically, if you were within a row or two of your assigned seat, there were no issues. And if someone said "Hey, that's my seat", everyone just moved over and it was fine.
They need to develop a system where the wristbands are given out during the week on a first come, first serve basis instead of at the gate. Other schools do this where students will camp out in line to get the best tickets. This way you still get the intended benefit of general admission where the students who really want to be there are putting in some effort and getting the prime seats and not leaving after the first quarter, but you avoid or at least reduce the madhouse and confusion at the gates we've seen.
Maybe need to start doing wristbands for East as well and funnel any students without a wristband into South when they're gone.
All of this but there is no student section in SEZ anymore. The old west corner nosebleeds are the 540 tickets now I believe
When I was a student (2007-14... not a doctor) students were required to collect their tickets from Cassel if they won the lottery. We could send one person with Hokie Ps and emails to collect a group of tickets so that friends could sit together. If you didn't come by within the allotted window (multiple days) they then opened up tickets to the waiting list of students.
Definitely feel like they should consider going back to this route and simply give the first 200 students the NEZ seats and the rest assigned seats in East Stands.
Its all eTickets now though so this wouldn't work. Unless you did some online queue but that doesn't really take any actual effort to get in first and likely just causes IT headaches with all the people hitting one endpoint at the same time,
My freshman year ('01) we literally camped for days in the field between Pritchard and AJ just to get mystery seat lottery tickets. My hall did it as a group so we would always have two people on shift
I was doing this a couple years before, but yeah - this is how it used to be. I remember a rotating cast of my friends keeping our spot in line for at least 2 days before the '99 Miami tickets were released. Not only was that a fun time, but it absolutely ensured the dedicated and/or smart fans got priority... they changed that up a few years later when we had the option at the beginning of the year to get the tickets upfront, but at an additional cost. Why isn't that done any longer? The shitshow we've seen for the UNC and ND games are enough to revisit the practice.
Exact same thing here. Ah, the good ol' days.
Freshman in 01 as well and remember waiting for the Miami game. We took shifts of about two hours. I believe mine was midnight to 2 am. Once they changed to lottery, everything went south. I remember people would just sign up for tickets in order to sell them or decide later whether or not they wanted to show up.
I was also a freshman in 01 and remember camping out for tickets and taking shifts. This was all before everyone had a cell phone so if someone didn't show up to relieve you from your shift you were stuck making a tough decision on leaving line or sticking it out. I missed a few classes to stay in line but never missed a game that year.
I hated waiting for tickets, camping out for a week trying to coordinate friends to relieve you do you could go to class. It was a mess season tickets were amazing when introduced.
If students are caught throwing beers, they should be banned for life.
I understand that even well-staffed security is going to be generally at the mercy of the mob here but also why are you selling beer to the general public in anything that's throw-able? Pour the beers into cups.
Such a no brainer here.
I don't want this to turn into a political discussion but I don't think the students are any more rowdy than times past. I think this has more to do with the 'let's go Brandon' chants than anything else.
Did this happen? I did not hear it. But I was not paying that much attention.
I've been to every game and haven't heard this. If it's happening, it isn't loud.
For reference, several times the "let's go Irish" chant was unmistakable last week, and visiting fans sit a lot farther from me than the students do.
Definitely happened at the UNC game.
Let's go Brandon
Let's go Brandon?
google it and understand why it's better not to discuss here.
Interesting.
Never heard that one before.
I understand the reference, but I still don't get what goodbadugly is trying to imply there. In any case, even though I haven't been to a game this season, it sounds like a lot of people are saying that the crowds have been rowdier than normal this year. That is, I kind of doubt the university is overreacting here.
I think this has everything to do with the fact that dealing with the Students General Admission processes has been a shitshow this season, and now has a spotlight on it because of some videos that went viral from the ND game. Between that and students basically going wherever they wanted for the UNC game, often causing issues with season ticket holders, yeah.... Something needed to be done.
The best, and virtually only option (and it may have been you who brought it up in another thread) is to expand the NEZ and make that purely students. Idk what the capacity of that section is (3,000?)...but make it 10-15,000 and overhaul the rest of the stadium (single seats instead of bleachers, like UL) to accommodate the rest of the ticket demand and leave it at that. Ohio State has it down in that realm.
And to beat the "the soil is bad" crowd...as a grading contractor, that is easily fixable. To beat the "not enough room" crowd...that is also fixable. To beat the "we lack the funds to pull that off" crowd...I do not have that answer.
It's correct to limit students in Lane before some tragedy occurs. The video we saw last week is an unacceptable amount of herding.
What's an acceptable amount of herding?
Something less than the ND game herding, apparently.
I dunno. Being able to move your arms around, maybe. If you can pick up both your feet and get carried by the crowd, it's too tight.
It was bad. I had 10 tickets and the parties split up from my season tix and the singles. Sec 5 and 9 just below the 25 and 29 ramps so we always go in there and go down. My party in 5 got smashed into walls by the herd and have bruises to show for it. I'm a well built 6' 230lb and was able to play full back to get my party through in 9. Was crazy bad.
Unbelievable to kick people out that want to support the school and team IMO. There are empty seats every game, they should just be glad people want to keep showing up at this point
Every student should have a ticket to the game, period. No ifs, ands or buts. They are the future of the Hokie Club. It's my understanding that the online ticket situation has made it much more difficult to get into Lane. Stop doing online tickets. Make paper an option and make getting into the stadium as easy and quick as possible. Don't sell beer in bottles. Pour them in cups. This isn't difficult but it seems like every decision around our football team is somehow difficult.
Yes beers should be in cups, but being in bottles doesnt absolve students from responsibility when they throw them.
No, it doesn't. But if I'm the Athletic Department, I'm all about mitigating risk and not sticking my head in the sand because we used to have "Hokies Respect" campaign. If there is alcohol involved and alcohol now available in the stadium, there is no doubt that at some point, college kids will get drunk, start a fight or do some dumb shit, and throw a beer bottle. It will happen. I can't believe they serve beers in bottles. At the least, it should be those aluminum bottles.
They are the aluminum bottles and cans as well. No glass that I saw.
Don't understand how online tickets make it more difficult. If anything it makes it easier for a student, as you don't have to find a printer. I found myself trying to get to a printer many a gameday (more often for basketball, but still)
Just spitballing a theory here but my guess is online tickets make it more difficult because they're scanned and people don't have them ready. So that's a lot of time lost to scan and wait while people (usually drunk) fumble around their phone trying to load up their ticket. It may only be a few seconds, but a few seconds can add up over the course of thousands of people.
With paper, it may have to be scanned but you basically have it ready. And even before the days of scanning, the gatekeepers were trained to know what actual tickets look like so it's actually could be a tiny bit faster for them to visually give it the ok than it is to scan it. Again, we're talking minimal time in seconds but over the course of a full crowd, it adds up.
There's things they could do to speed things up for sure with the current system. But I sorta lean the "old school" way is better for this kind of situation. I'm in no ways a luddite, but there are some things in life that aren't really improved that much by newer technologies. This might be one of them
Paper tickets with barcodes work great.
Technology can work great, too, but sometimes does not.
If a person's method doesn't work, send them to the "problem line" to get it resolved, don't hold up the whole line over it. Sucks, but it's reality.
The only difference is that you pull up the barcode, or QR code on your phone instead of a piece of paper. It's the same process at the scanner. It's true that if someone doesn't have their ticket downloaded they'll have problems, but at least it's solvable now as opposed to the paper tickets where you have no recourse.
Im a fan of GA seating in the interest of getting more dedicated students into the stadium and in seats they want to be. Way too often in my time at VT (2009-2014) you would have people winning the lottery but then not going to the game even after picking up the tickets. I also like limiting North so you dont have other empty parts of the stadium. I would have hoped students would be mature enough to handle not being absolute assholes to each other.
As for the fights and thrown items... that makes me so ashamed to be a Hokie. We had an entire thread talking about the safety of going to WVU. Well... WVU sounds like a safer stadium these days.
The problem (as I see it, so you're getting what you pay for here) is that we have too many moving parts and there are too many simultaneous issues. When you think about it, only our current senior class has had one year of the "normal" college experience. There's a lot of pent-up energy among the students that is coming out in bad ways. Student conduct referrals are up, sexual assault reports are coming in multiples per week, etc. The entire campus community is under strain from all of that. Couple it with new seating policies (on its own, I love the general admission idea but it's got its challenges), beer sales (also doable on its own but there seem to be a LOT of logistical problems), mobile ticketing (you can tell everyone to download the tickets in advance but they're not going to and the crap cell service doesn't help), and pandemic-related staffing issues for security. It's all one big dumpster fire. So VT is trying to solve one thing at a time and having limited success. We will see how the latest plan goes but I also know of some really atrocious student behavior that never would have happened when I was a student. I was in some crazy student sections, but we weren't assholes to each other. We had a code of conduct. A lot of that is gone because so many of our students have no idea what "normal" game day behavior is.
When you keep an enormous mob of drunk 20 year olds packed in like sardines for an hour, with their health at risk from stampeding and such, some of them are gonna act out, especially those without tickets.
I'm glad that the university seems to be concerned about the few idiots throwing things and all, but I'm extremely disappointed in their refusal to do anything of substance to make entry safer (i.e. more points of entry). If people had died in a stampede last week (people were legitimately passing out and being trampled), it seems the university would have just said "oh well, it's just dumb students." They taking the concerns of non-students seriously (kids without tickets stealing reserved seats), but they don't seem to take the concerns of the students seriously.
I have friends (fellow grad students) who are not gonna go to the game tomorow because last week was such a shitshow and they felt unsafe. I wish VT took our concerns seriously...
I went to 4 years of VT football games as an undergrad and student entry was never a major problem. I think the changes in entry policy directly correlates to the change in results that we've seen this year.
I am pretty old fashion (and never developed a taste for beer) but I saw trouble coming with the sale of alcohol at games.
To be fair, it is not clear to me that the trouble started before folks started drinking stadium purchased alcohol or after they started drinking stadium purchased alcohol. In any case, bottles and / or cans are definitely NOT the wisest choice for stadium crowds.
I know tailgaters, for example, might have been drinking for several hours before the game ever starts. Letting folks buy even more once they are in the stadium seems to me to be like using a burning match to see if there is any gas in the tank, i.e., a REALLY bad idea.
People get drunk before a game . With wait times and cost most will probably only a beer or 2 during the game .
I would be less drunk with the ability to buy beer rather than smuggling in liquor
VT could have just waited a half and student attendance would've been limited organically...
Let's just say they did them a favor.
I clearly don't need to ever donate if they have so much demand they can limit their own currently paying, and future alumni base.
I was pretty much in the "no donations ever to VT" bus after them kicking my fraternity off campus. Done with all this.
VT is soooo bad at alumni (current and future) engagement.
Students winning a free lottery ticket is currently-paying customer base?
Students paying for tuition sure is IMO.
How many years has it been since tuition guaranteed your right to attend a game?
I'll just leave it plain and simple- not wanting to get into "rules analysis". I am perceiving this as an alumni as anti student mentality from the university and is just completely unacceptable to me.
Let me ask you- do you think they are good at alumni engagement (both current and future?)
No but I don't think adjusting ticketing on the fly due to unsafe student section conditions has much to do with that
Well, here we are talking about it. Therefore, clearly, there is some number of people who feel this way which is self evident proof.
The fact is that they're limiting attendance FOR the safety of the students.
Which is, in fact, protecting them.
Sure, they need to fix it in the longer term, but in the short term they're doing the prudent thing.
They didnt reduce paying student seasin tickets, just lottery....
Good thing you guys don't work in PR
When I was a student every upper classmen bought season tickets and lottery only applied to freshmen.
CJF doing his part to help limit attendance in Lane.