Maryland has made basketball season tickets available to the general public for the first time in 15 years, another indication of the influence of a down economy on the school’s athletic department.
Brian Ullmann, the school’s senior associate athletic director for external operations, said there were 1,681 unsold season tickets as of late last week at the 17,950-seat Comcast Center. By comparison, 888 tickets were placed into single-game sales in November 2008.
“Any decline is a concern,” Ullmann said. “I would say 4.4 percent, season tickets are $599, to only see that sort of drop is pretty darn good in this economy.”
Nevertheless, selling season tickets to the general public is a remarkable step at a school that hasn’t afforded regular fans such opportunities since the days of Joe Smith and Johnny Rhodes. Starting in 1995, Maryland required membership in the Terrapin Club, the department’s booster organization, to buy basketball season tickets.
Filling up Maryland’s old home, the 14,500-seat Cole Field House, was rarely an issue as Steve Francis, Juan Dixon and Lonny Baxter passed through in the venerable building’s final years. Last year, the Terps averaged 17,048 in home attendance, the lowest for games included in the season-ticket package since Comcast opened in 2002-03.
The department is selling season tickets to the public in sections 204, 211, 217 and 224, all of which are in the corners of the arena’s upper deck. As in past years, single-game tickets also will be sold when students do not pick up the entirety of their allotment.
Ullmann said the problem Maryland faces is not decisions by previous season-ticket holders not to renew as much as not finding new purchasers.
“Any place will have natural attrition,” Ullmann said. “What we saw was natural attrition we didn’t backfill as well as we had hoped. If on the average you lose 700 season tickets, usually you make up for that because you sell 700 season tickets. We lost basically the same number. We just didn’t add as many new ones.”
Coach Gary Williams acknowledged economic pressures, combined with Maryland’s reseating plans in 2002, 2005 and 2008 based on donation levels, have played a role in the recent availability.
“We charge a healthy price for the tickets,” Williams said. “I would think one of the first things you cut back are what you would call incidentals. You have to eat. You have to pay your rent. You have to pay for your car. Tickets are kind of down there. Plus, when we moved from Cole to Comcast, we’ve seat-licensed three times in that process. That puts the price of the tickets up. It’s one of those things. It’s a fact of life in college sports that men’s basketball has to pay for a lot of the bills.”
Maryland found at least one additional revenue stream to plumb. The department sold four midcourt seats that previously housed a table for three reporters.
Ullmann declined to provide a specific amount the school received from the courtside seats, which are available only to the school’s top 100 donors. The base ticket price in that area is $2,200 a season, though an additional undisclosed fee can lock in the opportunity to purchase those seats for several years.
“They have the option to purchase the long-term rights to those seats, and in this case the person applied to do that,” Ullmann said.
For the entire building, though, typical fans still have options to see a team returning all but one starter from last year’s 21-14 outfit that reached the second round of the NCAA tournament and is ranked in several preseason publications.
Williams, who points out few basketball programs are thriving in large metropolitan areas, believes the course of the Terps’ season will dictate the sales of the remaining tickets.
“Nobody could have forecast what the economy was going to be like,” Williams said. “That’s the way it is. I think we’ll come pretty close to selling all our tickets. There’s tickets available right now, but we’ll see how that goes as we get closer to the start of the season.”
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