Louisville reaching the Final Four has been the most exhilarating experience I can think of over the past few years. This one is even sweeter than the one in 2005 in my humble opinion. But for students at the University of Louisville, this week has been bitter-sweet. The University received 710 tickets that were reserved for students at a special price of $25. The tickets were supposed to be available on Monday at 10 a.m., but due to an unfortunate event many UofL students are upset that they were unable to get tickets.
A mass email was sent out Sunday informing students on how to obtain the $25 tickets on Monday morning. The link was supposed to go up at 10 a.m. but a pulled fire alarm delayed the posting of the link about 15 minutes. During this 15 minute time span, it is reported that the link was leaked by an unknown intern in the athletic department and that only eight tickets were purchased before the general student population had access to them. These tickets were reportedly revoked by school officials. Another problem that occured was that the Student Government Association (or SGA for short) posted the link on the organizations Twitter page. The problem with this is that not all students use Twitter and the ones that do may or may not follow the SGA's page. At the time of the incident I checked the SGA's Twitter account (@SGAUofL) and they had only about 1,100 followers. The student population at UofL is around 20,000.
The Twitter world on the other hand has a totally different version of the story going around. It has been said that SGA officials gave the information to friends who then sent the link out in mass texts. This caused an unfair advantage to students who were impatiently waiting for the link to post to the schools athletic site, UofLSports.com.
I interviewed Randy Woodford, a student at UofL. Randy says that he was sititing at his computer refreshing the link every few seconds and when the link did finally appear, the tickets were somehow already gone. This incident did not sit well with UofL students and even made the local news.
I for one, do not really buy the University's version of the incident. The whole situation was handled terribly and has left many students very upset (including myself as I was also unable to purchase tickets.) To make matters worse, it has been reported that several members of the SGA were able to get tickets.
While this incident was very unfortunate, we still support our university and the athletic program. Time heals all wounds and a win over Kentucky would be an instant cure. Go Cards!
No comments:
Post a Comment