Dream Bigger
Crunch time at the ticket office
The high school football season is fast approaching, which means it’s a busy time of year for Lisa Hughes, secretary for Stephenville High School’s athletic department. This is when she finds herself saying “no” and “I’m sorry” countless times a day.
Hughes handles season ticket sales. If you live outside Texas, and thus aren’t familiar with the fevered culture that surrounds high school football here, the whole notion of season tickets for football games played by teenagers may come as a surprise. If so, brace yourself. There’s more: Hughes rarely sells a season ticket. She renews season tickets. Having seats become available is so unusual an event that if you put your name on Hughes’ waiting list today, you might be watching games from your reserved seat in 2011. But that’s “if you’re lucky,” she says. “And they wouldn’t be good ones.”
A football fan writes a check for four season tickets
In fact, interest in football is so strong hereabouts that the Stephenville Yellow Jackets don’t even play their games at the high school. They are instead played at Tarleton State University’s football stadium a mile or two away, which can accommodate bigger crowds.
The Yellow Jackets won four Texas state football championships in the 1990s, and the feeling around town is that a return to those glory days is looming. For Hughes, though, that spike in interest only means the waiting list for the 1,400 season tickets gets a tad longer. There are 80 names on the list now, and the best hope for those on it is that a current season ticket holder will go to his heavenly reward.
Hughes takes yet another call about tickets
One current season ticket holder came by seats in exactly that fashion: After hearing about the death of an elderly woman whose family had season tickets, he called the woman’s daughter to express his condolences. After what he hoped was an appropriate pause, he asked whether the family would be keeping their season tickets. The answer was “no.” The seats are now his.
Hughes says some ticket holders have maintained their seats for decades. She knows of one fellow who moved away from Stephenville ten years ago but faithfully drives back each summer to renew his season tickets — a task so important, apparently, that he doesn’t trust it to the U.S Postal Service. “He says he’s going to retire back here someday, and he wants to keep his tickets,” she says.
Actually, Hughes keeps two waiting lists. One is for people seeking season tickets; the other is for current ticket holders who want to upgrade their seats. But there’s not a lot of difference in the success rate between those two groups.
The word “sorry” is routinely invoked for both.
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