Football Ticket Priorities

With football ticket time approaching, Whitey Burnham, Dartmouth's assistant athletic director and the man responsible for the sale and allotment of tickets, is painfully conscious of the figure 21,416. That is the number of seats available in Dartmouth's Memorial Stadium.

"Everyone wants to sit on the 50-yard line, which is understandable," says Burnham, "but the impossibility of making everyone happy is one reason why a student-faculty committee in 1969 recommended a priority system to the DCAC."

Here's how it works:

Early application has no bearing on the quality of seats assigned. The only date that matters is the deadline for applying for tickets for each game. (Applications for the Yale game in Hanover began arriving last November.)

Top priority goes to undergraduates, who get the center seats in the West Stand, beginning with seniors. House blocks come after the classes. Then come faculty, staff, and administration.

Alumni seating begins with the reunion classes, oldest first, followed by non-reunion classes in the same order. Both East and West Stands are used in the latter case, in order to give the best location possible.

Next come the non-preferred assignments, which are seats not in a class section. Each alumnus is entitled to a designated number of seats in his class section, depending upon the game, and the rest are assigned in non-preferred locations.

Finally comes the review of applications received after the deadline. They and the general public get any remaining seats.

"A first-come, first-served system would be easiest for the ticket office, once the students are taken care of," says Burnham, "but alumni deserve all the consideration we can give them and the reunion-class plan seems the fairest. That way each class will periodically get good seats."