With the first football game of the season coming up this weekend against Sam Houston State, students lined up first thing in the morning on Monday, Aug. 29, some starting even earlier, to pull tickets for themselves and their friends. 

Among them were Michael Mubarak, petroleum engineering senior, and Katie Hayes, Class of 2022, two Impact co-chairs. Standing together in line at the ticket window for group pulls, they held 653 sports passes between the two of them. 

Mubarak said though a lot of attention was brought to the fact they pulled over 650 tickets this year, they did something similar during the last football season. 

“Not everybody knows about this, but last year Impact, in a less organized fashion, pulled 413 tickets,” Mubarak said. “It was more so [Impact] people finding each other in line and getting together. This year, I thought that it can be done in a much more efficient manner. I texted all the chairs if they wanted to pull in a very large block. That information was disseminated to everybody and people started dropping sports passes off to me.”

Mubarak said getting the tickets was a gradual process, so they didn’t have to gather all the sports passes at once. 

“Individual camps first gathered their ticket, then the freshmen gave it to their [camp] parents who gave it to their [camp] parents,” Hayes said. 

By the time the Ziploc bags of sports passes got to him, Mubarak said 20 to 40 camps were planning on pulling tickets. Mubarak 

said about 90% of people who were pulling tickets were freshmen, and since it was a group pull, all of their seats are on the third deck of Kyle Field.

Mubarak and Hayes called the ticket booth ahead of time, ensuring the ticketing team was ready for the massive amounts of tickets they were planning on getting.

“We waited our turn and we even let some people behind us kind of go in front who were in smaller numbers,” Hayes said. “Whenever we finally got to the ticket line, we were first like, ‘Hey, we’re the group that we call about,’ and her face was like, ‘OK’  —  she was bracing herself a little bit. We just thought it was really important to just take a couple minutes, talk to her and get to know her a little bit. I think it’s just really important to really see them — she’s not just a robot. Her name is Erin, she was incredibly helpful.”

Mubarak and Hayes said they did everything they could to have the process go smoothly, and even had their own calculators to keep track of the tickets.

“We had probably five or six people there each with tallies and numbers,” Hayes said. “We set up a super coordinated and efficient system to make it as easy as possible. One of Erin’s supervisors was also there, standing behind it just encouraging her. Her supervisor also came out from the ticket booth office and was helping the people behind us as well so the line was still moving.”

Hayes said they plan to get the sports passes back to the freshmen in a similar manner to the way they were picked up.

“We pulled together in a big group, but the essence of it is this is just 28 or 29 groups of about 35 people [each],” Mubarak said. “Leaders from each camp are going to pick up their bags of tickets and sports passes and take them and then they’ll be in charge of disseminating those down to their 30-plus freshmen.”

As for their actual gameday plans, Mubarak said the Impact group will meet up as individual camps to make sure everyone has the right amount of tickets and give students a chance to see each other again after the summer break.

“We kind of consider [the football game] a follow up event [of Impact] to a degree as an opportunity for counselors to interact with their freshmen and an opportunity for them to continue to walk with these freshmen through their first semesters in college,” Mubarak said. “Giving them time as individual camps to dive in is important, but once we get into the stadium, that’s when a more unified group will begin.”

Hayes said she remembers sitting with her Impact group during her first football game and said it calmed her nerves, after her initial anxiety about who she was going to attend the game with. 

“I remember being like to my counselors, ‘I just give [my sports pass] to you and you sort everything out for me, and we get to have a fun weekend?’ It was just super enjoyable,” Hayes said. “Them doing that for me, I felt really served and cared for — that’s just the heart behind it. Once we get into the stadium, we’re just going to be a unified group. Before we are Impact, we’re Aggies. At the game, we’re not gonna be wearing our [Impact] colors, we’re gonna be wearing all maroon cheering on the Aggies and showing them what it means to be a Fightin’ Texas Aggie.”