By Camille Rasor | Reporter
In the past week, Sing tickets went on sale, and with that came stress, server crashes and a sold-out Waco Hall for six nights of performances.
Unfortunately, this is the case for Sing ticket sales every year. Though Student Activities has tried to make the purchasing process better, it’s still not an effective way to sell seats at one of the biggest events on campus each year apart from sporting events.
People looking to buy Sing tickets online enter into a virtual waiting room through a system called “Queue-it” at a specified time before tickets go on sale. Once tickets are released, users are chosen at random to purchase their tickets so as to not crash the server.
There are two main problems with this system. First, people should be given the opportunity to buy tickets in the order that they log into the waiting room instead of being chosen at random once tickets are available. It isn’t fair that a person who was in the waiting room an hour before tickets went on sale should have the same chance to buy tickets as someone who logged on three minutes before tickets become available.
Second, although the Queue-it system is supposed to prevent the server from crashing, it doesn’t work well enough. For example, when I was purchasing tickets this year, as soon as the system redirected me to the ticket-purchasing website, my browser told me that the server couldn’t be found. This happened to several of my friends as well.
Another problem with Sing tickets is that there are simply not enough seats available for the number of people who want to come each year.
According to Baylor’s website, there are 14,108 undergraduate students enrolled in classes this year. Waco Hall has a seating capacity of 2,200, which comes out to 13,200 seats available over six nights of performances. That’s not even enough to hold the undergraduate population, not to mention the family, friends and alumni who want to come see the show.
Waco Hall opened to the public in 1930. It’s fair to say that the size of the Baylor community has grown exponentially since then.
It may be time for Baylor to consider expanding Waco Hall or even to look at building a new, bigger auditorium that could be used for shows like Sing and Pigskin. At the very least, it doesn’t seem like too much to ask for Student Activities to figure out a better way for tickets to be sold.
Camille is a junior University Scholar major from Burleson.
