As I walked up to Bartels Hall this week to grab a hockey ticket line number for the last time, I thought back on all of the hockey line procedure changes over the last seven years. Here’s a bit of my retrospective.

2002: My First Time

I stood with several other students outside my Court Hall dorm room. It was roughly 1:00 on a Saturday morning and, although hockey tickets were obviously a hot item, we didn’t really feel much of a sense of urgency — so long as we made it to the Ramin Room several hours before roughly 9:00 a.m. (when, I think I remember, the line was supposed to begin).

Well, we were wrong. When we got to Bartels Hall, there was a line formed outside of the Ramin Room, along the back wall of the building. It was already snaking inside — about seven hours early. Although we didn’t know if we’d get in, we kept the faith and got in line. Eventually we made it, slept overnight inside, and ended up with some seats in Section G a few days later. Not the best seats in the world, but I was a freshman — so I knew no different.

2003: The Insanity Begins

The end of the 2002-2003 season brought me to Buffalo where The Red was participating in the Frozen Four. They didn’t win, but their ride through the playoffs was enough to create hockey insanity on campus. The buzz surrounding the team the following season seemed to significantly raise demand for season tickets.

As lines formed on the west side of Alumni Fields, athletics personnel disbanded them. Eventually, some students — thinking that they were brilliant — started a paper list, trying to set one of the illegal lines in stone. The story goes that a car pulled up, someone ran out, grabbed the list out of the line-leader’s hand, got back in the car, and sped away. Chaos ensued.

Eventually some other students — thinking they were equally brilliant — went and bought some rope. “This will keep the line in place,” they thought. Wrong. It only caused more conflict and unnecessary fighting. In the middle of all this, I sat with my friends roughly several hundred people back on the west side of the field. The athletics department eventually caved and we moved inside.

2004: A Lawsuit Waiting to Happen

The athletics department didn’t want a line starting days in advance because the University didn’t want anyone to miss class, so they developed a new idea: during the evening during a particular week, athletics would announce, on WVBR, a location on campus where the “line” would begin, and numbers would be distributed. Sounded interesting, and strangely fun.

Problem is, the chosen location was the parking lot across Alumni Fields from Bartels Hall. Thousands of students from all over campus bolted to the scene — which would have been fine if thousands of other students hadn’t gotten in their cars and sped to the scene at the same time. Remember — the line started in a PARKING LOT. So, you had students running in the same place were people were driving their cars like maniacs. It’s a wonder no one was killed.

2005: My Senior Year — The Lynah Stampede

The athletics department thought it had learned its lesson: don’t start the line in a parking lot if people could potentially drive like maniacs to get there. So, in trying the radio announcement system again, athletics thought it would try a more benign location: the front door of Lynah Rink.

A little obvious, no? Most of the students who were waiting for this announcement were trolling on campus with hand-held radios — and they were waiting mostly by Lynah, figuring that the athletics department wouldn’t want to lug everything it needed to distribute line numbers very far from its home base. So, when the announcement was made, a mass of a thousand or more people rushed toward the doors at the same time. And the doors were locked.

People pushed and shoved, and people were injured. My jeans were ripped and my radio destroyed. I got tickets, but not without losing a few years off my life.

2006-2008: A Safer, But Less Exciting, Alternative

The 2006 line brought a new procedure — the modified lottery that the athletics department uses today. It’s not as fun as camping outside, and it’s not as death-defying as a race to a mystery location, but it works.

I do have one suggestion for the athletics department, though. Although I think the lottery system serves it’s purpose by distributing the tickets in a relatively fair and safe fashion, there’s no way to ensure that those sitting in the most sought-after sections are the students that should be sitting there: those that follow the team week in and week out, always show up to games, and don’t treat it as merely another extracurricular activity. Those people that actually would camp out days in advance if given the chance.

My suggestion is pretty simple: make the season tickets general admission. If you want the best seats, get to the game early. I can’t imagine more than a couple hundred people would arrive at Lynah early enough for this to be a problem (I know I wouldn’t be one of them). And, this way, you ensure that Section B is filled with the most dedicated and knowledgeable fans game in and game out. Penn changed their student basketball ticket system to general admission this year — why couldn’t and shouldn’t Cornell do the same with hockey?

Just a little food for thought. Let’s go Red.

Eric Finkelstein ’06 is a former Sun managing editor and a third year student in the Law School. He can be reached at efinkelstein@cornellsun.com. Saturdays Excepted appears alternate Mondays.