Student tickets for the 2009 football season will be stored on student ID cards and will be sold following the same procedure used for the 2008 sale, the athletic department announced Thursday.
Unlike in previous years, students will have to check a new "Student Central" Web site, gopsusports.com/studentcentral, instead of e-mails, for more information about the sale, said Associate Athletic Director Greg Myford.
Myford said last week that athletics officials were still debating whether to commit to the ID-card system because of concerns about the logistics of using it on football game days.
Myford said Thursday that officials have not decided on specific solutions for all issues but have concluded the system will be feasible to use.
"We're still deciding what the best way is to handle a couple of different aspects of what our student body's used to in attending a Penn State game," he said.
Myford confirmed students can sell tickets to other students using an online system run by Ticketmaster that will be similar to the Nittany Lion TicketExchange, which is used by non-student season ticket holders.
There will probably be a cap on the price at which tickets can be sold, but an exact price has not been set yet, he said. Since one of the main goals of the ID-card system is to limit scalping, Myford said he doesn't want to allow a "Wild West" pricing system online.
Students will also be able to reserve blocks of adjacent seats using this online system, he said.
One issue still up for debate is whether to allow students to "upgrade" tickets by paying an extra fee to allow non-students to use them. Myford said officials had developed procedures to make upgrades possible but he is unsure if students want to allow upgrades.
"There's a question of whether or not we should be serving the Penn State students first," he said. "It could still go either way."
University Park Undergraduate Association (UPUA) President Gavin Keirans said he thinks bringing a non-student guest should "absolutely" be allowed. Council of Commonwealth Student Governments (CCSG) President George Khoury also said upgrades should be allowed.
"As long as I get the second ticket legitimately and I want to upgrade it, then that's fine," he said.
Paternoville Coordination Committee President Alex Cohen also said he doesn't have a problem with allowing ticket upgrades.
Myford said he will continue to solicit information from organizations like UPUA and CCSG before a final decision is made. More specifics about using the ID-card system to sell tickets and enter games will be released on Aug. 4, he said.
Myford said the athletic department chose to use last season's student ticket sale procedure because students with whom the department consulted thought it worked effectively.
"Frankly, it worked well enough last year that we had no reason to make any major changes," he said.
Student leaders agreed that last year's sale was reasonably successful.
"The system they have right now is the fairest they're going to get," Cohen said. Cohen said he especially liked having a pre-registration period because it helped weed out people that only wanted to buy tickets to resell them.
