The NCAA runs 90 championships across 23 sports, with a variety of ticketing strategies for those events. In a morning Q&A at the ’17 AXS Ticketing Symposium, NCAA Dir of Championship Marketing & Ticketing Josh Logan talked about the organization’s ticketing approach, as well as marketing strategies to drive attendance and revenue. Logan was immediately asked about the NCAA’s premier event, the men’s basketball title game. Logan: “We’re out there planning a good 18 months ahead of time. We then come into the host city for monthly meetings around nine months out. ... And not only are we playing in a football stadium and putting a basketball court at the 50-yard line -- we’re bringing in a seating system of our own to put on the lower level. So we put in 20,000 of our own seats, and that’s more than many traditional arenas. And we’re selling the other 50,000 seats. A lot of pre-planning to put together something of that size.” While some have taken issue with holding an NCAA hoops title game in a football venue, Logan said there is always “more demand than tickets.”
BUDDY SYSTEM: Logan discussed the role of partnering up for ticketing for a big event like the Final Four, saying, “Relatively, we’re a small staff. Just doing the ticketing from a men’s Final Four perspective, it’s myself and one other staff member. ... PrimeSport sells and produces our ticketing and hospitality packages. AXS does our digital ticketing, so we use the Flash Seats technology. This may or may not be the biggest digital ticket event out there. Of the 70,000 or so tickets out there, half may be digital. ... AXS coming in and training our staff is incredibly valuable to us.”
NOT JUST HOOPS: Logan mentioned softball, wrestling and volleyball among other big events for the NCAA. He said, “We sort of look at our top revenue-producing championships and focus primarily on those. There are around 15 of those, all at the Division 1 level.”
