By Carol Morello and Thomas Heath
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
The fax machine at George Mason University's athletic ticket department had a one-hour backlog yesterday. The athletic director's voice-mail box filled with dozens of messages faster than he could empty it. His e-mail was clogged with several hundred messages.
Overnight, a school that normally cannot fill the seats for home basketball games was in possession of 1,200 of the hottest tickets in town. On Friday, the Patriots will play Wichita State University's Shockers in the NCAA regional semifinals at Verizon Center.
Being the belle of the ball is a new role for the men's basketball program at the school. The team averages 4,500 spectators a game at the 10,000-seat Patriot Center in Fairfax.
But now, not even family members can expect a break prying tickets from Andrew Ruge, the school's associate director for marketing. "My mom, maybe," he said with a tone suggesting even she might have trouble talking him into it. "Someone offered me my favorite beer. But I'm trying to be neutral."
With ticket prices from scalpers running more than $1,000, schools that get allotments of $130 tickets for a two-game package are wrestling to find fair formulas to dole them out.
George Mason has set aside 400 tickets for students, who will have to line up tomorrow to buy them. About 100 are set aside for the family and friends of the four coaches and 14 players. That leaves fewer than 700 tickets for everyone else. And they are being rationed as meagerly as gasoline coupons in wartime.
The school has established a priority point system in a complex formula that measures how many years fans have held season tickets and how long they have donated money to the athletic scholarship fund. Donors at the Gold Patriot level, who have given $3,000, can get four tickets. Everyone else is limited to two.
"It's loyalty as well as financial support," said J.L. "Buzzy" Correll III, head of the 600-member Patriot Club, who has a ticket. "We're in uncharted territory. A lot of this is new to us, as well as the donors who have been calling all day."
The fact that one of the regional tournaments is being held in the school's back yard has fueled demand. At the first- and second-round games held over the weekend in Dayton, Ohio, George Mason sold only 460 of the 550 tickets it was allotted.
Georgetown University also is setting aside its ticket allotment for its most loyal fans and donors, said spokeswoman Kim Frank. She added that many Hoyas fans in the area have purchased tickets for the games at Verizon Center, she added, instead of buying an expensive, last-minute airline ticket to Minneapolis, where the Hoyas will play Florida on Friday.
George Mason expects to have decided by late tomorrow who gets tickets, after administrators have sorted through the pile of requests dripping with cajolery.
Applications started rolling over the fax machine 5 p.m. Sunday, right after George Mason's upset win over North Carolina. The application was printed on the school's Web site, along with a deadline of 5 p.m. yesterday. When Ruge checked his e-mail about 3 p.m., he had 200 messages.
Some professed years of adoration.
"They said they were alumni who had been following the team for 20 years, and they were longtime fans of the program, that kind of stuff," said James Meyer, director of tickets and promotions for athletic games, sitting at his desk littered with faxed applications that he had sorted into priority piles. He also has a ticket. "I told them all the same thing: Fax the form in."
Still others turned to superstition.
"Crossing fingers," wrote a George Mason employee at the bottom of his fax requesting two tickets.
On the open market, tickets to this weekend's games can cost as much as some people pay for a month's rent. A front-row seat to games at Verizon Center was commanding $1,100, according to TicketsNow.com, an online ticket service near Chicago. The cheap seats high in the upper levels of Verizon Center, however, were going for as little as $140 on TicketsNow.com.
Jeff Greenberg of ascticket.com, a Washington area broker, said a ticket package for Friday's and Sunday's sessions at Verizon Center was running between $1,500 and $2,000 for a top seat.
"The best stuff in the building is running about $1,000 a ticket," he said.
If that sounds like a lot of money, Greenberg said the prices would be even higher if George Mason had more of a history as an athletic powerhouse.
"The buzz is not great," he said. "Do you know anyone who graduated from George Mason? When you don't have any tradition, it's not as big a deal when your team goes to the NCAAs."
But history has to begin somewhere, and for many George Mason students and alumni, making it this far trumps all else going on in the world this week.
"I want three tickets so I can go with two of my buddies who are Mason alumni, too," said Kevin Holmes, who could not get through the busy fax number and went to the ticket office with David Kettner, a friend who was trying to score 12 tickets. "This is the hottest show in town."
Staff writers Susan Kinzie, Dan Steinberg and Eric M. Weiss contributed to this report.
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