Wednesday, July 24, 2013

UND Football: Dexter Albrecht explains ‘30 Minutes or Less'

I was able to ask Dexter Albrecht the Director of Ticket Sales & Promotions at the University of North Dakota, a few questions about the University of North Dakota’s ‘30 Minutes or Less’...  Which UND is running on July 31, 2013. It's a season tickets promotion for UND football, where if you order season tickets and you live in the Greater Grand Forks Metro Area and you don’t have them delivered to your home or business by the UND football staffers, student-athletes and athletic department officials in 30 minutes or less, they’ll be free.  

Eric Burton: So, you can guarantee that every UND fans living in the Greater Grand Forks Metro Area that orders a Season Ticket will have it in 30 minutes or less?

Dexter Albrecht : I don’t think I can 100% guarantee that, and that is kind of the hook for this. You can get to most places in town in 30 minutes or less, but we’re limited on cars, drivers, and coaches so if we get swamped with orders it will be difficult to get tickets to everyone. We could be giving some away or a lot away depending on how many orders we get.

The main reason we wanted to do with this was to create awareness to the program, and the great home schedule we have. Last year football attendance increased over 1300 fans per game and currently we have already sold close to as many season tickets as where we finished last year, so we’re on pace for some great ticket numbers. Along with that we traditionally have a lot of people that wait until the week of the first game to purchase season tickets. We wanted to give those people a reason not to wait to purchase their season tickets, as well as maybe get some people who were on the fence about getting them.

If you break it down with the schedule we have I really think you will have a hard time finding a better value for your entertainment dollar in the state of North Dakota, Southern Manitoba, or Northwest Minnesota than season tickets for as low as $75 a seat for 7 home football games with 5 of them being against ranked opponents.

Eric Burton: Also, will the team deliver season the tickets to a person’s place of work if they want; if that person lives in the Greater Grand Forks Metro Area?

Dexter Albrecht: We will deliver these tickets to anywhere that our fans would like, as long as it’s in Grand Forks/East Grand Forks city limits. Home, work, or your own business it doesn’t matter to us.

Eric Burton: Taking a look at the UND football schedule, it looks like UND’s schedule is again one of the toughest home schedules in FCS Football?

Dexter Albrecht: It does look like a tough home schedule and I know the coaches and players are fired up for the season. While it’s a tough home schedule it’s also a very attractive schedule for fans.

To give you an idea of how attractive the schedule is for no just UND fans but casual college football fans, we have actually had multiple people who have purchased UND season tickets this year that have also told me they also have football season tickets for North Dakota State, and Montana State. I’ve also had people tell me they are fans of NDSU, Montana, and Montana St. first, but they live in the area and can’t make all of those schools games purchase season tickets with us because of the value of the tickets and the great home schedule we have. To me that’s great, we’ll take those fans and try and convert then to UND fans, or fans of both schools.  

I would also guess that we will probably have some of these fans of other schools who won’t purchase season tickets with us, but they will still come to a game or two of ours because of all the big games on our schedule. That’s a credit to the Big Sky Conference as well as schools like NDSU, SDSU, and USD. There are a lot of people in the state and region that cheer for success for all of the local Universities and casual college football fans in the Dakotas do not have very far to go anymore to see great college football week in and week out and that’s exciting for everyone.

I would also say that statement translate into all sports (basketball, volleyball, etc) with the four Dakota schools all being Division one now. With us being in a different conference we offer fans of those schools an opportunity to see schools they don’t normally see in the Missouri Valley Conference, and the Summit League which makes us a little unique and I think that is attractive to casual fans. They all know who Montana, Montana State and Eastern Washington are in football or who Weber State is in Men’s Basketball.

Goon’s World would like to thank Dexter Albrecht for stopping by and answering a few questions. UND opens the 2013 season against Valparaiso August 29, 2013,
at 7:00 p.m. at the Alerus Center.  


Season-ticket packages start at $75 per seat and are also available for purchase any time at undsports.com.
Enhanced by Zemanta