Ole Miss students who bought football season tickets may have noticed a change in the ticket delivery method from previous years.
For the first time since before the 2010 football season, student tickets were not loaded onto the student ID cards, and such cards will not be suitable for entry into Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.
Rather, each season ticket holder received an email Tuesday afternoon that included seven individual links for their tickets to each home football game. The links brought them to a digital ticket, which could be placed in either their Apple Wallet or Google Pay.
Ole Miss Athletics decided to make the change to add convenience to the game day entry process for students.
Katie Wisdom, the director of ticket operations, said that the switch to digital tickets was made to eliminate the problem of students having to hold onto their IDs to enter the stadium on game days.
“Sending mobile tickets to students is easier to manage because they are no longer tied to their student IDs, which can be lost, misplaced on game day or stolen, resulting in the inability to enter the stadium,” she said.
The change is also expected to ease the stadium entry lines, as well as make it harder for unauthorized ticket sharing or swapping.
“Contactless tickets will allow for easier and quicker entry into the stadium,” Wisdom said, “as they are not barcoded and the user simply needs to tap their phone to the handheld scanner to enter. Students will also be less likely to lend out their phones, as opposed to lending their student ID to someone.”
While the student ticket transfer process has not changed, fan reaction has been mixed.
Alex Ligman, sophomore engineering student and two-year student season ticket holder, said that this is just a case of fixing something that is not broken and brought up the possibility of cell phones dying prior to kickoff. This would leave students virtually ticketless, as opposed to the IDs, which did not rely on personal phones
“Leave it to the university to take something that worked perfectly fine and screw it up,” he said.
Sophomore exercise science major Sara Hoffman agreed that the change may be unhelpful to students.
“Students are going to find it (the change) to be an unnecessary inconvenience, since no one really seemed to see a problem with the old way.”
Overall fan reaction is yet to be heard, as the Rebels take on the Arkansas Razorbacks in the first home game Saturday evening at 6 p.m. This will be the first game under the new ticket entry system.
