Game day at ASU attracts students from all four campuses, but students on the Downtown campus have been voicing their concerns about missing out on the tradition of camping outside Wells Fargo Arena for tickets and the ability to line up early for football games due to the distance.
Frank Smith III, the Undergraduate Student Government Downtown president, said he agreed that downtown students miss out on “Camp Fargo” festivities.
“I think less people do camp out from Downtown as well as the smaller locations, but there are your students that are going to camp out no matter what,” Smith said. “There are several Downtown students that’ll take shifts and they’ll switch off, but going to Camp Fargo is a little bit more difficult.”
Joe Palumbo, a freshman exercise and wellness major on the Downtown Phoenix campus, said he takes the light rail to and from football games, but it would be too difficult to camp out when his classes are in Phoenix.
“It’s a fun thing, apparently,” Palumbo said. “There’s a marching band and stuff going around, and people are going crazy.”
Taylor Severson, a junior criminology major on the Downtown campus, also said she would go to Camp Fargo if it weren’t so far from her downtown classes.
“It would be inconvenient to camp out because all your stuff is here,” Severson added.
Associate Athletic Director at ASU Bill Kennedy said many of the students on the Downtown campus can still partake in Camp Fargo activities by organizing groups of students who take shifts between classes, however he agreed with Smith that the distance makes downtown students less likely to attend.
“We are looking at ways to allow Downtown students to be more involved,” Kennedy said.
Any changes that may occur will not be implemented until next football season, he said.
Bennett Dwosh, one of the Tempe students on the Student Ticketing Subcommittee of the Sun Devil Athletic Operations Board, said student tickets have never completely sold out.
“We always have extra student seats, so students all have the opportunity; and we’ve never sent a student away because we didn’t have seats for them,” Dwosh said.
Dwosh also said in the first hour after the wristband line opens, about 5,100 students get their tickets, which means there are still plenty of lower-bowl tickets available to those who did not arrive prior to wristband distribution.
“I wouldn’t say that being on any specific campus really has that much more of an advantage,” Dwosh said. “Obviously, if you can’t camp out all week it’s quite challenging to be from another campus, but the real growth of it happens the night before when it jumps from a couple hundred to a couple thousand. So you may not be in the first 200 to 300 students there, but if you get there Friday night you’ll be in the first 1,000 students, you’ll be in section 32 and have a great experience.”
For the second home game of the 2014 football season, students on the Downtown Phoenix campus had the ability to register online ahead of time to reserve their tickets, and then go to Tempe to pick up their wristbands and enter the stadium. This system allocated a certain number of wristbands for Downtown students, and increased their chances of being in the lower-bowl of Sun Devil Stadium.
Smith said this system is what the Polytechnic and West campuses use, and Downtown students were able to test-run it for a game.
“It’s really effective for the Polytechnic and West locations,” Smith said. “We did it once, but the demand wasn’t there.”
Kennedy said that of the students on the Downtown campus who did reserve tickets, only about 50 percent of them actually picked up their wristbands at Wells Fargo Arena, so the system wasn’t effective enough to keep in place.
Dwosh said there was backlash from students who got upper-bowl tickets but saw there was plenty of space in the lower-bowl because so many students who reserved tickets didn’t show up.
Dwosh said it is predicted that the entire student section will be lower-bowl, eliminating the need for students to be as competitive for those seats. He said this change is a prediction, and not official yet.
“Some of those concerns about needing an online reservation to get lower-bowl tickets will be gone because all of the seats will be in the lower-bowl,” Dwosh said. “So part of the concern won’t be there anymore.”
Contact the reporter at nina.barone@asu.edu
