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Current Wahoos woke up this morning to an email from Virginia Athletics outlining the new student basketball ticketing system. From the email (original email had poor image quality on the text):
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This may or may not be a big change from years' past. Last year, Orange Passport events would reward students who attended other Virginia sporting events throughout the fall (i.e. Field Hockey, Soccer, Volleyball, etc.) in return for a better chance at scoring basketball tickets. It seems that this is still the intended approach, as students will be able to earn "Sabre Points" based on attending "other designated home athletic events."
However, likely as a result of their vendor change, there have not been any Orange Passport or Sabre Point events, which means that for the home opener against Morgan State, all students will be level and will have only one entry for the ticket lottery if they so choose to enter into it. If students are as excited about basketball games as we are, and if the Morgan State game does indeed go to the lottery system, then an extremely unlucky fan could miss out on getting tickets early on in the season, and will therefore have a harder time getting tickets for the bigger games later on in the season. May the odds ever be in your favor, Virginia students.
Note also, students will need to have a smartphone for easiest access. From the same email regarding new admission and entry times: :format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4189949/Screen_Shot_2015-10-22_at_4.31.19_PM.0.png)
The Wahoo Facebook-verse did not react so well: from our favorite fan:
What if we turned this into a 5 day long open forum on why the new points system for basketball is dumb as hell?
Posted by Cammy Leech on Thursday, October 22, 2015
The Athletics Department must be receiving some significant pushback across the board, as they tweeted this out today:
All students are starting with 0 pts. The opportunity to earn additional pts is coming soon. Pts have never carried over from previous yrs
— Virginia Cavaliers (@VirginiaSports) October 22, 2015
So, they're aware that there haven't been any points-earning opportunities yet, but hopefully this changes soon and the diehard Wahoo faithful will be able to differentiate themselves from the casual spectator.