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Tickets to each area high school basketball playoff game went on sale this past weekend, and prices in both District 5 and District 6 are the same for both students and adults.
The root of the issue stems from the use of exclusive online tickets sales through Hometown Ticketing and playing postseason games at smaller venues as single games rather than using large gymnasiums like Hollidaysburg, the AAHS Fieldhouse, Tyrone or Central Cambria for doubleheaders.
"The problem is, because we're letting higher seeds host now, and everything is through Hometown Ticketing, mainly due to COVID and our number of competitions have doubled since we're now playing single games instead of doubleheaders," District 6 chairman Bill Marshall said. "There's no way to delineate. If Penn Cambria is playing Tyrone on Saturday, 750 tickets are going to go live at the same time, and then they shut off, and we can monitor that. If you had different ticket prices, we have no way of monitoring that they are equally divided through online sales. We have no way of knowing if it's a student that is actually buying the ticket."
Marshall said in the past, District 6 would send out rolls of 500 tickets to schools to sell for postseason games, but with the smaller capacities, sell outs occur much more often than in the past.
"We don't really have a good solution of how we can have different ticket prices until we get out of COVID until we can start playing again in gyms that we know aren't going to all sell out," Marshall said. "That is the problem. We actually talked about if Penn Cambria was playing Tyrone, releasing 375 tickets to Penn Cambria and 375 tickets to Tyrone, but the problem if you do that is each school is given a specific code, so if the community wanted to purchase tickets, they have to call the school to get the code, and we didn't want to do that."
The base price for District 6 playoff games is $8 with a $1.58 service fee that is a surcharge that goes to Hometown Ticketing.
"We figured we'd follow the PIAA price structure," Marshall said. "That's what we deferred to. We want to wait and see what happens after this year. Again, it's hard to tell how it will play out because we're having so many games playing only single games with higher seeds hosting, but it has nothing to do with revenue or not trusting the ADs and how they handle the money. That's false. We have full belief in our member schools, it's just when you are now playing at sites where the capacity can be reached, we have no way of selling two different priced tickets."
District 5's base price for games like tonight's North Star at Northern Bedford girls game is lower, and there is no service fee.
"Our tickets are $6, and there is no service fee," District 5 vice chairman and Northern Bedford athletic director Jeff Batzel said. "You go online to the District 5 website and go to the (purchase tickets) link, and when you click on that, you are given the choice of all the games going on the next two days, girls and boys, and you click the red button that says, 'get tickets' and you buy your tickets online."
Portage girls basketball coach Lance Hudak expressed frustration over the ticketing situation on Twitter Sunday night.
"$9.58 for a District Playoffs basketball ticket?!?!? This is sickening! Best time of the year ruined for so many people," Hudak tweeted. "Especially our students who we count on to fill our stands!"
Marshall said District 6 is hoping to get back to having larger schools host playoff games in the future, but in the current format, paper tickets are an issue due to capacity levels.
"When you're selling paper tickets at both schools, you have no way of knowing when you have reached capacity," Marshall said. "It's a no-win situation."
Batzel also expressed frustration with not being able to sell tickets at different prices for students and adults.
"With Hometown Ticketing, you're unable to differentiate between the two, which I think is a problem," Batzel said. "But I guess I'm in the minority."