NU makes change to student seating
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BY BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star
Student seating inside Memorial Stadium will see some changes, beginning this season.
About 2,000 seats reserved for students will go from the lower half of South Stadium to the upper half. All student seats will now be general admission, though plenty of students will tell you that’s basically how it’s been anyway.
The planned movement of some student seats to the upper reaches of the stadium — made in part because students often stand during games — has not occurred without some eyebrows raising.
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Steven M. Sipple and Brian Christopherson discuss seating changes at Memorial Stadium. (Anthony Roberts / JournalStar.com)...
“It’s a difficult situation because I think a lot of students support the move to general admission, difficult as that may be,” said David Solheim, UNL student body president. “(But) the seating reallocation I think is deeply troubling to the student body.”
Nebraska athletic director Tom Osborne said the change was made because many students were often standing on top of seats, making it difficult for ticket holders behind them to see the game. Some of those people voiced their complaints.
“This will not be a moneymaking move,” Osborne said. “The fans who are seated higher will not be charged more to move down.
“Any time you make a change, there will be some people who are not going to like it,” he added. “Just so you understand, it’s been an ongoing issue for several years, students not just standing up, but standing on top of seats.
“We feel everyone who pays for a ticket is entitled to see the game.”
Osborne said it was tough to gauge students’ reactions to the change as of late Wednesday afternoon. The athletic department had fielded three calls on the issue, he said, and the ticket office had none.
However, the topic created quite a buzz on radio talk shows and Internet message boards.
To stand, or not to stand: That was the question.
Osborne believes the move isn’t actually giving students a lesser deal than they already had, noting that student prices ($21 per game) will not go up through at least the 2011 season and that upperclassmen will now receive priority seating in the East Stadium.
“From my standpoint, students will not be given worse seats,” Osborne said. “When I was an assistant coach and tried to call plays, I wanted to be as high as I could be to see the whole field.”
In the fall, the university’s student body government sent two proposals to the athletic department on what to possibly do with student seating. One proposal was to make seats general admission as opposed to the block seating format that was being mostly ignored by students.
“The idea was really to match practice with policy,” Solheim said. “You can get a ticket with a seat number on it, but nobody sits there, right?”
In early February, athletic department officials said they liked that proposal, but wanted to add the element of extending student seating to the top of the South Stadium in Sections 12, 13 and 14. With this move, students would give up some of the lower seats in Sections 14 and 15.
On Feb. 8, some department officials met with Solheim and two other student government members discussing this change.
Solheim said he didn’t expect a new seating plan to be agreed upon at that meeting. He thought it would be something that might be talked about for a few weeks before a decision.
“I think that’s where my perception is different from the athletic department’s,” Solheim said. “I think we left that meeting saying that we can agree to the general admission and generally the idea here is good. We want to make this a better situation here for everyone involved. But there’s some serious issues involving moving about 2,000 students from close to the field to back farther up in the stands.”
Osborne was not at the Feb. 8 meeting, but said “from my understanding, the whole policy was explained and when everyone left the meeting, there had been no serious objections that were voiced.”
He said he was sorry if anyone felt slighted, adding, “I hope they realize those are still good seats.”
Briefly
Jon Osterhout, a graduate assistant football coach at Nebraska the previous two years, has taken a job as a defensive line coach at Sacramento State.
It’s the same school Osterhout starred at as a player from 1995 to 1999.
Osterhout worked primarily with the defensive line while coaching at NU.
Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7439 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.
