Dayton Flyers fans will miss the printed tickets, but digital ticketing is here to stay

Few Dayton fans had the opportunity to experience digital tickets last season due to tight attendance during the pandemic. Everyone will have digital tickets this season.

Legend

Dayton Flyers ticket stub of December 7, 1968, game against Bowling Green. Photo provided by Dave Schindler

Here to stay

In an email to season ticket holders earlier this month, UD explained the change: “making this transition allows UD Arena ticketing more flexibility with billing for season tickets, reduced points of contact for fans and event staff, provides the ability to issue and / or change tickets for any match within hours, and will reduce the prevalence of counterfeit tickets in circulation and lead to a better daytime experience match for all Flyer fans.

In the same email sent to season pass holders, they were invited to attend an open house at UD Arena this month to practice using their digital tickets. The open houses will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday and Wednesday next week (October 18 and 20) and from October 5 to 7 on October 26. Fans should confirm their attendance for an open house by sending an email to [email protected].

The day the printed subscription sheet arrives in the mail – a sort of holiday in Dayton – will not come. Instead, fans will use the Dayton Flyers Gameday app to access their tickets.

“Digital ticketing is here to stay,” said Dayton athletic director Neil Sullivan. “COVID has sped it up, but it’s a bit like boarding passes on planes now. It’s here to stay. Our job is to provide the best customer service possible, which we will do, and anyone can call our ticket office at any time. “

Representatives from the ticket office even went to people’s homes or workplaces to show them how it worked, Sullivan said. UD has already practiced digital ticketing. Fans of the Basketball Tournament last summer and during high school graduation in the spring used digital tickets to enter the UD Arena.

“There’s no doubt there will be challenges at the start,” said Sullivan, “but at the end of the day our fans know we’ll have them in the building. We’re going to work on it.

In the new era, fans download tickets to their phones and have them scanned at the door. Sullivan urged fans to add the tickets to their digital wallets to speed up the process. UD can change game times on digital tickets as needed. This could not be done with printed tickets posted before the season. Fans can also use Ticketmaster’s ticket exchange website to sell or buy tickets and easily transfer them to other fans.

Legend

March 7, 2020 Dayton Flyers ticket stub

Treasured souvenirs

For convenience, digital tickets are hard to beat, but no one prints them out at home and sticks them in a scrapbook or throws them in a big bucket. This is where Jeremy Bystrek’s ticket collection was when I asked Dayton fans to send me pictures of their collections. His father John collected tickets throughout his tenure as a basketball season pass holder at Dayton.

Jeremy was kind enough to let me take pictures of the tickets at his house in Columbus. He organized all the tickets on his kitchen table. I saw at a glance what makes ticket stubs so special. The design has changed over the years. The fonts, colors, logos, all showed different eras of Dayton basketball. They brought memories back to Jeremy.

“My parents, at the time, had level 200 tickets,” he said, “and we were in the middle of a row behind the basket. Sometimes my sister and I would cram in there with it. them. I’m sure our neighbors maybe didn’t like it, but it seemed like a very friendly crowd. It was great to have been there on sunny days.

Gary McCans was there at the peak and almost every other day. He was UD ticket manager from 1969, when UD Arena opened, until the 2015-16 season. He understands the move to digital ticketing, but it’s also sad to say goodbye to a tradition.

“It’s like anything else,” McCans said. “It’s probably not as important to today’s generation. They have other ways. I think the selfie is the new memory.

Jeff Schroeder, a 1986 UD graduate who now lives in Lebanon, would always prefer to have a ticket in hand. He has a collection of banknotes stuck in a photo album.

Schroeder plans to travel to Orlando to see Dayton play in the ESPN Events Invitational in November. He bought tickets for all three games, and of course, those are digital tickets.

“I remember when I was a kid going to different events,” he said. “I am from Northwestern Ohio. I’m a huge Reds fan, and maybe once a year I’ve been lucky enough to attend a Reds game. It just got really special to me. I have the ticket stubs, and I just remember putting them on my bulletin board. The older I got, the more I began to pile up tickets, and put them in envelopes. I needed a bigger envelope, and the next thing I know is I have them in a shoebox. I do not know why. I just started saving them over the years. I’m 58 now, and if we still had them, I would save them anyway.

Even if UD wanted to stick to the printed tickets, it would be difficult to do at this time, Sullivan said. Digital tickets have become as prevalent as metal detectors and bag checks. They are a part of life in 2021. Perhaps that will make the old ticket stubs more special. For this story, I created a photo gallery showcasing the Dayton tickets over the years. Many fans have sent me pictures of their tickets. Everyone understands the digital switchover and yet the good old days are missing.

Dayton fan Courtney Deutsch did me a favor by summing up this whole story by sharing a screenshot from her phone, which showed a text message from the Dayton box office with the following message: “Your digital tickets from the University of Dayton Basketball is here!

On Twitter, Deutsch wrote: “I’m fine with the switch to digital tickets – but it’s certainly a lot less fun than having my physical Dayton Flyers subscriptions in my mailbox.”

Legend

Dayton Flyers ticket stub of March 3, 1985, game against Xavier. Photo provided by Matt Schwade