Recover That Fumble

The 1955 football season ended a week ago, the 1956 season is still ten months away, and College students--providing that their Yale friends back home will let them--would probably like to forget the whole subject for a while. The Athletic Department, however, is not forgetting. As Ticket Manager Frank O. Lunden indicated last week, the H.A.A. has already begun thinking about a new system of distributing football tickets next year, and will meet with the Undergraduate Athletic Council this winter to discuss the problem. At this time, before Christmas, midyears, and hockey have completely obliterated memories of the fall, it might be well to review the ticket operation of the past season and to consider some possible improvements.

To juniors and seniors at the College, the most significant thing about the present ticket plan is its infinite superiority to the system that it replaced. Anyone who remembers waiting in line at the Union every week--seniors on Monday, juniors on Tuesday, etc.--and arriving there at 7 a.m. in order to get good seats, will readily agree that the system now in use ranks second only to a pair of good halfbacks among the greatest possible boons of the H.A.A.

Yet the Boylston Street office certainly did fumble this fall on undergraduate tickets. Not just for the Massachusetts game, when upperclassmen "stormed" the H.A.A. on Saturday morning looking for their tickets, but throughout the season, students were failing to get their tickets on time from either the House distributors or the Athletic Department itself. Often the purchasers merely happened to miss the meals at which the tickets were available. At other times the distributor himself, because of an afternoon lab or perhaps an unreliable roommate, failed to get to Friday lunch in his House. In any case, dining hall distribution is inefficient and should be improved upon. H.A.A. officials, the U.A.C., and the Masters will have to work out the details of a new plan themselves, but they might consider a system of distribution through the House superintendents' offices or the students' mailboxes.

The H.A.A.'s ticket system this fall did not confine its mix-ups to Thursdays, Friday, and Saturdays, however. Besides scrambling at the end of the week to get their tickets, undergraduates frequently had to scour the College on Monday merely to get the envelopes with which to apply for tickets. A similar problem became even more infuriating a week before the Yale game, when House superintendents ran out of Yale discount slips on Monday and gave out Dartmouth ones in stead. A few days later the H.A.A. announced that it could not accept the Dartmouth slips, so some 130 upperclassmen were out not only $3 each but also their priority on the better seats in the Bowl. It was at this point that Mr. Lunden said he was considering some changes in the ticket distribution system for next year.

Not too much consideration should be needed, however, to realize that the best way to alleviate a shortage of inexpensive envelopes and paper slips is to print more of them. If the H.A.A. does this next year, and also adopts an improved method of returning the tickets to their purchasers, it will remove much unnecessary confusion from an undergraduate ticket system that is otherwise very good.