Has this question come up?

[Great Plains Gopher]

Do you automatically retain your season ticket seats in following years, as before - or are you subject to a contributions test that may cost you position?

 

[BrianW]

As I understand it, as long as you keep buying your tickets (and paying the $500, $250, or $100, if applicable), your seats are yours for as long as you care to keep them.

It's certainly possible that someone who picked later than you will overtake you in Gopher Points by contributing a lot of $, but they will need to wait for seats to open up if they want to improve their location.

 

[2nd Degree Gopher]

Brian is correct that on a year-to-year basis your seats are yours to keep as long as you pay for them and make any required donation. However, the Athletic Department has reserved the right to conduct a "re-seating" at some point down the road where your Gopher Points will once again establish the pecking order. As I recall, the literature says that there is no current plan to do that.

 

[Great Plains Gopher]

Thanks. That is reassuring...

 

[GoAUpher]

Thanks. That is reassuring...

It'll happen eventually, probably after expansion. I'd expect some expansion of the priority seating at that time (whenever that is). Nothing to worry about right now and its not something that would result in you losing your seats entirely, just the possibility of having to switch seat locations.

 

[2nd Degree Gopher]

I think they include the caveat for two reasons:

1) They don’t want to be ten years down the road, implementing a re-seating, and have people complain that they never warned them that it could happen; and

2) No one knows for sure how the whole preferred seating thing will work for football. It appears that they estimated the market well for this first year, but whether demand increases or decreases remains to be seen. The market may well dictate how long it is before the next re-seating since they can easily hold prices steady (or even lower prices or reduce the size of the preferred seating area) without causing many problems. But raising the rates or expanding the size of the preferred seating areas will undoubtedly ruffle feathers. They will want to be sure that there is sufficient demand before they try to do that.

For what it’s worth, I think people will complain anyway and I doubt we’ll ever see them lower the donation level, but I expect that they will hold the donation levels steady at least until they have fully incorporated the Gopher Points system into both men’s basketball and hockey and until they have cleared the fund raising hurdles for the basketball practice facility and the baseball stadium.