People attend games because they are fun.
That sounds simple, but I think it is easy to lose sight of when working in college athletics. In the modern era, watching a game on television is often easier and, in some ways, better for the fan. The view is good. The replays are immediate. You do not have to park, stand in line, or deal with the weather.
What the stadium can offer that television cannot is the feeling of being part of the crowd.
Students are a major part of creating that feeling. They bring energy and excitement into the building. They react to the game, stand, yell, and give the rest of the crowd something to engage with. When students are involved, the building feels more alive. That is what encourages other fans to want to be there.
Because of that, student participation has always been important to my overall ticketing strategy. It is not only about making sure students receive a benefit they are entitled to. Their participation improves the experience for everyone else.
That also means the process of getting them into the game matters.
Over roughly the past 15 years, Louisiana Tech has gone through several different ways of handling student tickets.
At one time, the process was very simple. Students showed their student ID as they walked into the stadium.
From the student’s perspective, that was easy. There was no ticket to claim and no account to manage. But the process created control issues for the department.
We had no reliable way of knowing which students were attending. Staff had to use a hand clicker to count students as they entered. Students also kept their ID after graduation, so there was no easy way to verify that only current students were using the system.
The next process gave the department more control and better tracking. Students had to request a ticket before each game.
They would follow a link, sign in with their email address, and select that they wanted to attend that week’s game. A ticket would then be placed in their account, and they would have to log in again to access it at the stadium.
I was not working at Tech when that process was introduced, but students were vocal about their frustration with it. Even as a fan of the program, I heard complaints that getting a student ticket had become too complicated.
The department could now track which students were using their benefit, but the process created a new problem. Most students were not thinking about getting their ticket several days before the game. They would wait until game day, often until they were already walking toward the stadium, and then try to complete the entire process.
A system that was supposed to give us more control was creating friction at the exact moment we wanted students to participate.
When I returned to campus, fixing the student ticket process was already a priority for me. I knew how important student attendance was to the atmosphere we were trying to create, and I did not want the ticketing process to be the reason a student decided not to attend.
The first change was to eliminate the weekly ticket request.
Instead of asking students to claim a ticket for each game, we added a season ticket to their account for every ticketed sport. The student no longer had to tell us every week that they planned to attend. They only had to log in and access the ticket that was already there.
Students told us the process was easier, but it still was not as simple as it needed to be.
The biggest issue was the email address they used to log in.
Every student’s official email address uses the @latech.edu domain. However, students were receiving inconsistent information across campus, and many believed their address was actually @email.latech.edu.
That small difference created a major problem.
I personally staffed the student gate that year, so I saw the issue firsthand. Students would be standing in line unable to log into their account, and the problem was almost always the email address.
They had already decided to attend. They had made it to the stadium. They were standing at the gate ready to enter, and the system was still getting in their way.
After seeing it during the first game, we sent an email blast to students explaining which email address to use and how to fix the issue. That helped, but only for the students who actually read the email.
Sending instructions was not the same as solving the problem.
The old Ticketmaster system also required students to add every individual ticket to their mobile wallet. Even after they solved the account issue, they had to repeat the process for each game.
When we moved to Paciolan, we had the opportunity to simplify the process again through its Digital Access Pass.
Instead of having a separate ticket for every sport and every game, students received one pass that worked for the entire year. The pass was emailed directly to them, so they did not have to know which email address to type into the ticketing system and they did not have to log into their account.
They clicked the link in the email, added the pass to their wallet once, and they were finished.
The biggest improvement was simplicity.
Students did not have to understand how our ticketing system worked. They did not have to know which account they had or which email address was connected to it. They only had to complete one step one time.
That system worked well, but it was not perfect.
The problem came when a student missed or deleted the email containing the ticket link. The pass did not appear in their account for them to add manually, and resending a new link was not always easy on our end.
We had removed the login problem, but we had created a recovery problem when something went wrong.
Now the technology is changing again. Paciolan will no longer deliver the pass through the same emailed link, which means students will need to log into their account to access it.
My concern is that we may be taking a step backward.
We have at least solved the problem of students adding every ticket individually. They will still only have to add the pass to their wallet once for the year. But requiring them to log back in creates the possibility of recreating the same email-address problem we dealt with before.
That is why single sign-on is so important and why I am pushing our IT staff to help us get it enabled.
If it works as expected, students will use the same credentials they already use across campus. They will not have to figure out how the ticketing system identifies them or remember which version of their email address belongs to their account.
In some ways, that could make the process even better than it was last year.
Students would be able to retrieve the pass from their account if they lost or deleted the original message. They would not have to wait for our staff to resend a link. Their account could also become a better place for us to communicate student-specific benefits.
For example, we have always offered students the opportunity to purchase discounted guest tickets. Last year, we placed that offer in their account. Redemption was okay, but many students still waited until game day and stood in line at the box office.
Ideally, making the account easier to access will also make those benefits easier to use. Students could find the guest-ticket offer earlier, complete the purchase themselves, and avoid another game-day line.
The original problem was that students found the ticket process too difficult.
Solving that problem required us to take a step back and look at every part of the process. That exposed other problems that were not as visible at first: account identity, duplicate accounts, mobile-wallet access, recovery when an email was lost, guest-ticket redemption, and the way we communicate benefits.
I do not think obstacles are always problems.
Sometimes a problem is what forces us to get better. It gives us a reason to evaluate what we are doing, why we are doing it, and whether fixing the most visible issue is enough.
I came into this process wanting to make student tickets easier to access. Each change has helped us improve part of the experience, but each change has also shown us something else that needed attention.
The goal has never changed.
Student participation matters. Our job is to make sure the process encourages it instead of getting in the way.