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July 6, 1999

University will set aside section in new stadium for faculty and staff

University will set aside section in new stadium for faculty and staff

When the Pitt Panthers begin playing football in the Steelers' new stadium in fall 2001, a special section will be set aside for faculty and staff.

The section will be located between one end zone and the 30 yard line on the home side of the field, on the stadium's lower level.

"Seating in that section will basically be first-come, first-served and you won't have to make a contribution [to the athletics program] to sit there," Pitt Athletic Director Steve Pederson told the University Senate athletics committee on June 24.

Pederson said he hopes a designated faculty and staff section will encourage employee groups to buy blocks of seats. "Maybe somebody will say, 'There are 10 people in our department and we all want seats together.' That's one of the great things about moving into a new place: If 10 people want to sit in a row together, we can arrange for that. We'll probably never have that chance again."

Fans willing to pay more for prime seats can select them through Pitt's new priority seating plan. The system awards points for a range of factors, including number of years as a season ticket holder, number of years as a donor, dollars contributed, and status as Pitt alumni or lettered athletes in a Pittsburgh campus varsity sport.

"Instead of charging people a particular fee to sit in a particular section, we're letting people pick where they want to sit and then seating them by the priority points system," Pederson explained.

"We're also telling people: As long as you maintain your current donation level, we won't take those seats away from you. If you're contributing $500 a year now and you continue to contribute $500 a year, you can keep your seats for another 50 years or whatever.

"At Pitt Stadium, some fans were telling us things like, 'Someone donated more money than me, so I got switched to seats that weren't as good.' That won't happen under the new system."

Season ticket prices for fall 2001 will range from $140 to $280 for adults, with a $105 youth season ticket available. Fans must make a $25 per seat deposit, which will be credited to their first-year bills.

"We've already published our season ticket prices for 2001 because we didn't want people to be wondering, 'Now that I've made my deposit, how much are they going to raise the prices?'" Pederson said.

"I'm sure there will be price increases at some point in the future. But we anticipate that we priced it fairly and that this is going to be our price range for a while."

Thirty operators are staffing the athletics department's ticket sales phone bank, set up in the Pitt Stadium press box. Also, the department has set up a sales office in 2 Mellon Bank Building, Downtown, where fans can try out a new stadium seat while they discuss ticket options.

"We want our current season ticket holders to have first choice to select their seats, so we're asking them to make an appointment, come in and talk about their seat preferences," Pederson said.

Last month, soon after ground was broken on the city's North Shore for the new stadium, Pitt athletics launched a marketing campaign around the theme: "Sundays are sold out, but Saturdays aren't — yet."

"When the Steelers moved into Three Rivers Stadium," Pederson said, "a lot of people said, 'I'm not going to buy season tickets until they get good.' Today, most of those people are sitting in the parking lot or in their living rooms watching the games and wishing they would have bought those tickets back in 1971."

Pitt will earn a cut (Pederson wouldn't say how much) from sales of luxury suites in the new stadium. Suites will be sold for all stadium events, rather than on a per-game basis. So if you buy a suite, you get it for Steelers games, Pitt games, etc. "That should help us build our fan base as well as providing revenue flow," Pederson said.

Senate athletics committee member Don Martin, who opposes relocating Pitt home games to the North Shore, criticized Pederson for moving too fast and thereby eliminating any last chance of saving Pitt Stadium — which the education professor called "the only anchor for the football program."

Martin asked: What if Pitt's football program continues its losing ways, financially as well as athletically, and support grows for downgrading the football program to the NCAA Division II level or eliminating it entirely? Without its own stadium, Pitt could opt out of bigtime football once its lease with the Steelers expires, some professors have pointed out.

Pederson replied: "I think we're making the most aggressive, dramatic moves in the country right now. If that's an indication that this football program ain't going to be around, that's the craziest notion. I think the silliest notion is that the only reason we have football on campus is because we own the stadium. If that's the only thing keeping football alive on this campus, then we have real problems."

But Martin was unconvinced. "When I came here in 1970, [Pitt administrators] were seriously considering dropping football" and probably would have done so if then-Chancellor Wesley Posvar hadn't stood up for the program. Since then, the University has let both Pitt Stadium and the football program deteriorate, Martin said.

"I can't go back and resurrect what didn't happen 20 years ago," Pederson countered. "All I can do is deal in today's world. If we don't deal in that, we're going to put this program right in the tank."

If Pitt drops Division IA football, it will kiss goodbye any chance of boosting revenue for its athletics program "because football and men's basketball, currently — and, I hope someday, women's basketball — provide a revenue stream for you," Pederson said.

Fortunately, he added, Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and the Board of Trustees understand the value of Division IA football to Pitt, financially and otherwise.

The possibility of eliminating or downgrading Pitt's football program "is not an issue for us," Pederson said.

Another member of the Senate athletics committee, English department lecturer Bruce Janoff, disagreed with Martin's support of Pitt Stadium. "I understand that there's a lot of nostalgia and many people are upset, but I think we're in more danger of losing football if we don't make the move" to a new, state of the art stadium, Janoff argued.

In response to a question from Janoff, Pederson said athletics will begin this fall to seek students' ideas on the best plan for transporting them to the North Shore beginning in fall 2000, when the Panthers will play in Three Rivers Stadium.

— Bruce Steele


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