By Nathan Vaughan
This year, the first wave of Beanpot tickets were on sale to students for just more than seven hours.
Demand soared due to the success of the men’s hockey team and their No. 11 national ranking, causing the rapid sellout. In response, the university acquired extra tickets from Harvard, who had not sold out their student allotment.
Wednesday at 7 p.m., 100 additional student tickets went on sale and about 20 minutes later about half of the NU seats had been sold.
Then, roughly 15 minutes later, the ticket office announced there were only 16 seats selling at $42 left, yet once again nobody left, despite a line going well into the main lobby inhabited by many students with no realistic shot at tickets.
Tickets sold out for the second time at 7:43 p.m.
The first person in line, Allie Otto, a middler political science major, arrived at 4:20 p.m. Less than three minutes later, others joined her in line. By 5 p.m., the line had grown immensely.
This time around, co-op students were out in force to get the coveted seats. Many said they changed their normal commute plans just to get tickets, including sophomore civil engineering major Kyle Whiting, who co-ops in Framingham.
“Usually I take the commuter rail home and get home at 6:30, but today I got a ride home so I could get home early for tickets.”
Whiting was unable to get home from work before the tickets were sold out last week.
Once again lines were long, this time reaching around the Snack Bar. During the hour before tickets went on sale, there were numerous students walking up and down the line counting to 100 to see if they would fit in before that magic number.
However, some students went home disappointed last night. The last ticket was sold to Sky O’Mara, a sophomore computer science major, who arrived just after 6 p.m.
Many people still had complaints about how the ticket sales process was handled. Kevin Borrer, a middler mechanical engineering major who is on co-op at Textron, said the line was handled poorly.
“I think the university is neglecting the problem,” Borrer said. “They say we are going to sell tickets but there is nobody here to watch and make sure everybody is just standing in line.”
Joseph Bachynsky, a sophomore business major who is on co-op and was unable to get tickets last time, was right around the cutoff point for the tickets. He was concerned with being so close to 100th in line, and fretted over what he said was rampant cutting going on throughout the night.
“They should’ve handed out numbers as we arrived or at least worked on the cutting process,” Bachynsky said. He purchased one of the last tickets.
This new block of tickets will be situated inside of the Harvard student section, located opposite the Northeastern section. The seats spread through three sections with a varying amount of rows per section.
Also joining the Northeastern students in the Harvard section will be a block of Boston University students. BU bought a block from Harvard in December.
So far scalping of the tickets has been a relatively small problem.
Only a few tickets scalped from the Northeastern student section have been discovered so far. Those found scalping have been told to stop, and have had their tickets invalidated, said John Gruppo, the athletics business and tickets manager at Northeastern.
Gruppo said some tickets have been found selling for an average of 6.5 times their face value.
It is unlikely that there will be more tickets available for students through the university. For faculty and staff, an additional 150 tickets will go on sale today at noon. Gruppo predicts that they will sell out within an hour.
