CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) – Good luck finding tickets for the Indiana Fever pre-season game against Brazil at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in May.
Within 37 minutes of being made available to season ticket holders and donors Thursday, all the seats were snatched up. Iowa went to great lengths to ensure that so-called “bots” were not the ones buying the tickets and selling them for high prices.
The words “Sold Out’ are plastered on the doors to Carver-Hawkeye Arena and the team website for tickets to see Hawkeye legend Cailin Clark and her Indiana Fever take on the Brazil women’s team in a pre-season game. That didn’t stop for a long time Women’s Hawkeye fan Jeff Kreinbring from getting four tickets for his Hawkeye-loving family.
“I was on the computer, and every time I would try to select our seats and add them to the cart, it kept telling me those seats were no longer available.
You also need to be a season ticket holder or a donor to get access to buying the tickets. Kreinbring says he started buying season tickets when it was obvious to him that Clark was a generational talent.
School leaders said they didn’t have much say in ticket sales but were able to negotiate for season ticket holders and donors to have first access. One of the reasons was to keep bots or outside investors from buying all the tickets and selling them. The worry is those bots would then turn around and sell those tickets for exorbitant amounts of money. Jess Rickertsen said the people selling these tickets ranging in prices from $600 to $5,000 weren’t investors.
“Those people selling are either season ticket holders or donors,” he said. “We do periodically review all accounts, even season ticket holds and donors, for secondary market activity.”
Rickertsen said Iowa has eliminated more than 200 accounts in the last two years because they were brokers or people buying for the sole purpose of selling the tickets at higher prices. A bill in the Iowa legislature would stop investors from buying tickets for resale.
“Eliminating bots that are going in and acting as if they are purchasing as a fan solely doing it to get up to hundreds of tickets and turn around and sell them, absolutely,” he said. “That is something we’d welcome.”
Kreinbring said he’s keeping his four tickets saying Clark brings to the game memories that are priceless to his family.
“She’s the kind of player that you just can’t look away,” he said. “If you look down at your phone or something like that, you might miss the greatest play that ever happened before.”
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