Basketball Ticket Plan Aims to Curb Cheating

CAA officials say the new plan aims to make it more difficult to cheat the system and to enable more students to sit in riser seats.

"The new plan is about halfway different," said CAA President Reid Chaney. "It's looking pretty good, and I think students will like it."

Under the new plan, bracelets will be handed out at Gate 5, the student entrance to Kenan Stadium, from Tuesday evening to Thursday evening.

When a student picks up a bracelet, a CAA representative will swipe the student's UNC ONE Card. A record will be made in the computer, and if the same card is swiped again, it will be rejected.

"The software allows us to track each student and make sure they only swipe their card one time," said Mike Freeman, director of card services. "It's got what we call an anti-pass back feature."

A member of CAA will announce the first number in the distribution at noon on Fridays in the Pit.

"We will use a bingo-style thing and have students reach in and physically pick out the numbers," said Mike Kuhn, CAA director of ticket distributions. "It takes all the selection out of our hands and puts it into the hands of the student body so there can be no allegations of cheating."

Chaney said the new plan is an improvement from handing out bracelets at the Smith Center, as was done in the past.

And Freeman said since Kenan Stadium is already configured for ONE Cards, handing out bracelets should proceed smoothly.

The actual distribution on Saturday morning will proceed in the same way as it did last year, with the only change being a new method of assigning riser tickets.

In the past, a separate number was drawn for the beginning of the riser seats. Under the new plan, the same number is used to begin both distributions.

Each student qualifying for riser seats will only get riser seats to one of the three games in the distribution and will get lower-level seats to the other two games. Last year, students were given riser seats for all the games in a distribution.

"This way, it allows three times as many students to experience the risers," Chaney said.

The CAA also is developing plans to add risers to the other end of the basketball court, but Chaney said this idea is still developing.

CAA members also plan to conduct a distribution for the Florida State University and East Carolina University football games. Students can go to the Smith Center and pick up randomly selected tickets over a three-day period.

Although new distribution policy is the biggest news members of the CAA have to announce, they also have plans for a homecoming concert. Chaney said the bluegrass-based jam band String Cheese Incident is "95 percent confirmed" to play a show at Memorial Hall on Nov. 7.

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.