FORT COLLINS — Colorado State athletic department officials Wednesday briefed members of the media about the plan to allocate seating in the new on-campus stadium scheduled to open in 2017.
David Crum, senior associate athletic director for development, and Ben Lorenzen, senior associate AD for sales, marketing and communications, delivered the briefing, and then AD Joe Parker answered questions from the media.
A 12-page brochure covers the basics of the process, and it will be mailed to season-ticket holders on Friday.
The brochure, though, already is available for viewing on the . It’s well-done and rather than try to give all the details here, I’d suggest looking there for a sneak peek.
The process will culminate with prioritized selection of seats in the spring of 2017, mainly in an online process, in the priority seating areas, which require an additional contribution of $500, $300 or $100 per ticket, depending on sections; or in the approximately 86 percent of the stadium that won’t require those additional contributions for each seat.
Priority — or roughly, buyers’ places in line during the final selection — will be based on “Ram Points,” a measure of financial support to the CSU athletic department, mainly through ticket buying and donations. Ram Points have been in effect since 2009, but the system of earning points has been tweaked considerably.
The process was formulated after getting feedback from Rams supporters.
“They’ve been very appreciative of having their voices heard,” Parker said. “It’s been a sense of real dialogue between our staff and people who have been season ticket holders and Ram Club members.”
I asked Parker something that I’ve always wondered about.
Why not just add the additional required per-seat donations to the cost of the ticket and make it a simpler price structure?
“Because, I think it was in 1986, there was a change in the tax code that provides for an 80 percent tax deduction for gifts associated with priority seating,” he said. “So it’s really to their advantage that there is a component that would be considered the cost of a season-ticket strip and then a component that will be for the priority location of the ticket. So if they make a gift of $1,000, it’s $250 per seat, $800 of that can be deducted on their income tax return.”
Terry Frei: tfrei@denverpost or twitter.com/TFrei
