On the night of any given basketball game, the push for tickets right before tip-off is significantly more frenzied at the Palestra than at Villanova's Pavillion.
The reason for this is not because more people prefer to watch Penn basketball than 'Nova basketball. In fact, the Wildcats boast a waiting list for season tickets that will take 19 years to get through.
In conjunction with Nova Savings Bank, mCom and Fujitsu, the Villanova Athletic Department opened a new automated machine in the Field House this season that enables students to pick up their tickets at any point before game time, cutting down a large amount of the chaos that surrounds the box office before games.
The marketing director for Penn Athletics said such a promotion idea with any bank has never been considered.
The "Nova Financial Center," which is covered in Wildcats logos and team colors, features two screens -- one that displays Nova banking information and another that runs videos of Villanova sports.
According to Chris Heck -- Villanova's assistant vice president and general manager of ISP sports -- such a change was necessary because of how Villanova distributes its men's basketball tickets to the student body,
As opposed to Penn's system of selling season tickets to students, Villanova gives 1,500 tickets away to its student body in a lottery each game.
Before the new "information kiosk" existed, most students would pick up their ticket the day of the game with the regular ticket-holders, delaying everyone's entry and generally making it more difficult for box office attendants to operate efficiently -- as they were dealing with both the ticket holders who paid and those who did not at the same time.
"It takes one very important task off their plate," Heck said. "They don't have to worry about being interrupted with 1,500 students wanting their tickets, and students have their flexibility of when they want to come pick it up."
Now Villanova students use the machine -- similar in style to an ATM -- anytime during the Field House's hours of operation, which allows the Athletic Department to track who is picking up their tickets over the Internet, thus enabling them to give out any remaining tickets the night of the game.
Heck said the idea of giving the machine ticket-dispensing capabilities was not brought up until late discussions with Nova Savings Bank -- in fact, it had already agreed to install an ATM in the Field House.
"We started a new [five-year athletic] sponsorship with them and it came up as we were talking about ways to give them exposure to fans and Villanova students alike," he said. "They said that they could probably come up with distributing coupons, but I said, 'why don't we just do it for tickets?'
"It's pretty awesometechnology."
Even though the machine has only been in use for a couple months, Heck said the project has already been a customer service "home run."
"People would complain when ticket office was closed at 5 p.m. Now it doesn't matter if it's closed."
Heck said that Villanova is the first program to incorporate such technology into its repertoire, but that he does not think they will be the last.
"I think a lot of people are intimidated by the whole idea," he said. "It has to be the right bank partner that will roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty. ... It's natural [for such technology to work], it's just a matter of figuring out how it will work for your individual team."
