Texas A&M President Mark A. Welsh III took responsibility for the “surprising and disappointing” issues that occurred during last week’s ticket pull for the football game against Texas.
During a press conference in the Memorial Student Center marking one year since his appointment as president, Welsh said the ticket pull for the Lone Star Showdown — which spurred health and safety concerns after thousands of students crowded around Kyle Field’s ticket windows — was unacceptable.
“There’s a whole lot of people now pointing figures about it — blame me,” Welsh said. “This is my responsibility to make sure we don’t let that happen again, and we will not.”
Emergency services received at least nine calls related to students in the line, and three were transported after not feeling well. Students pulled more than 30,000 tickets on the first day.
In a sit-down interview with The Battalion, Welsh said administrators have been debating the tradition for several months. But issues at the ticket pull for the LSU game caused the president to “bring it up again as a discussion item.”
In August, the Division of Student Affairs issued new guidelines stating students could not form lines before 6 a.m. on the Sunday before that week’s pull, but the rule wasn’t followed for the Texas pull after students swarmed the ticket windows following A&M’s win over New Mexico State.
“There was enough bad behavior to go around this last weekend, and there were some very un-Aggie things happening out there,” Welsh said. “There were people not respecting others. … None of that is acceptable here. And that part was surprising and disappointing, quite frankly. We’ll look at the administrative side of this, the support infrastructure. There’s been a lot of work this year to try and make it safer, which is why this was really surprising. But that buck stops here. We’ll get it fixed.”
Welsh said around the time LSU’s ticket pull occurred, Student Body President Cade Coppinger approached him about the possibility of surveying students on their preference for an online option. Of 1,374 sports pass holders who responded to at least one part of the survey in October, 63% preferred an online option.
In his president’s brief on Friday, a monthly email update sent to every student, Welsh wrote that administrators will be “taking a hard look at how we handle ticket distribution in the future.”
“How do we manage a physical ticket pull, if we continue with one, to make sure that none of the stuff that happened this week happens again?” Welsh said. “Because it’s completely unacceptable. And, if we go to a version that’s an online version, how do we maximize the utility of that version so we put as many of the characteristics into it that students value in a ticket pool as we possibly can? We probably can’t provide the same level of service somebody at a ticket window can and the same amount of flexibility, but we’ve got to do whatever we can. But what we’re not going to do is what happened … early this week. We’re just not going there again.”
