I want you to imagine the following scenario:
You wake up, the sun is still rising and there’s that eerie silence outside of a city that’s still mostly asleep. You’re exhausted and full of regret for not going to bed earlier. Sluggishly, you dread what you know will be hours wasted of your day standing in obnoxiously long lines. “Maybe it won’t be that bad this time,” you think to yourself.
You arrive at your destination to a sight of lines stretched for what seem to be miles. After choosing which line seems to be the shortest, you wait for hours to be met by snarky workers who make the oh-so-pleasant experience you just had even more enjoyable. Hastily, you get what you came for and get out as soon as possible.
Where did your imagination take you? Plausible answers would be getting something at the Department of Motor Vehicles, voting in a presidential election or getting the newest iPhone the day it comes out. Unfortunately for Aggies, all those answers are incorrect. The scene I set was getting a student ticket for a Texas A&M football game.
I’ve experienced this too many times, and my hours of waiting in line have left me plenty of time to think about the whole process. The conclusion I have come to is that the ticket pulling process the 12th Man Foundation has created is outdated, unnecessary and needs to go.
To get a student ticket for a football game at Texas A&M, you need a couple of things: to be a registered student at A&M, a sports pass and common sense. Unfortunately, the last point is one a lot of my peers are missing.
Ticket pulling is divided into separate days based on classification. If you’re a senior or graduate student, you get priority and are the first to pull on Mondays. Juniors pull on Tuesdays, sophomores on Wednesdays and freshmen on Thursdays. There is a way to pull on other days, though. This is what I like to refer to as the golden rule of ticket pulling and where common sense is thrown out the window. It’s the one-to-one ratio rule.
If you are a senior, you can pull for anyone in a grade below you; however, you must have one senior sports pass per underclassman sports pass. So, if you had four senior passes and four junior passes, everyone would be good to go. If you had four senior passes and five junior passes, one of those juniors is out of luck and won’t be getting a ticket for that game.
Time and time again, this has led to backed up lines and what little efficiency the whole process had being thrown out the window. There is a solution that avoids the confusion of this process and leads to no long lines, though.
We live in the age of the internet, and it’s time the 12th Man Foundation and A&M incorporate student tickets into this age. This university needs to move to online ticket pulling.
I know, I’ve upset some of the Old Ags — which is nothing new anyway — but hear me out!
First and foremost, this is not an uncommon practice. Clemson University, for example, utilizes an online system much like many other universities. Some schools have even simpler methods, such as the University of Mississippi, who just use their student ID’s on game day to walk right into the stadium. As long as they have paid for their student ticket, they’re good to go.
Some of you may be thinking that an online system would lead to a crash, considering the massive student population we have, and that’s a legitimate concern. However, it should be kept in mind that the entire university went online for almost a full year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, thousands of students register for classes at the same time every single semester. Frankly, I find it hard to believe the university could not move the process online.
And yes, everything would need to stay the same regarding classification and pull days, seniors would still pull on Mondays and so on and so forth; it would just be done online. You’d get your spot, have the tickets downloaded on your phone and show up ready to cheer on the Aggies on gameday.
The only thing that would change is waiting in long lines stretching from the ticket box to the Memorial Student Center and dealing with snarky student workers. I don’t know about y’all, but that sounds like a win in my book.
Sam Somogye is a political science senior and columnist for The Battalion.