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.
