Duke Basketball Season Tickets

People in North Carolina like basketball. This, combined with the fact that Cameron Indoor Stadium can only seat about 9,000 means that going to a Duke University Men's Basketball game is kind of a tough thing to pull off. Undergraduates, who aren't eligible for season tickets, have to wait before every home game in order to get a seat. They camp out for the UNC game for weeks.

Luckily, as a graduate student, Rachel has a different route to get tickets. I won't say easier, because it's not. This weekend was the 2008-2009 Graduate Student Season Ticket Campout. Even though I'm technically a graduate student, too, they only let full-time students camp out. Apparently my $6,500 doesn't go very far at a place like Duke. Here's how it works. About 2000 grad students all bring tents and beer to a parking lot at around noon on Friday. Then, starting about 7:00 that night, everybody is required to stay around their tents until 6:00 AM on Sunday morning. In between that time, periodic "roll calls" are made. Each person is required to go and check in with the campout committee and prove that they are still going strong. At 10:00 or 11:00 at night, these checkins aren't that bad, but at 3:30 AM, they can really start to drain on you. And there isn't some nice lady with cookies walking around and politely telling you that it's time to check in. There is, however, a blow-horn blasted into a microphone. That just kind of adds to the fun.

So this is how we spent out time this weekend. I think we averaged like 2 hours of sleep each night. In return for going through all of this, you're not even guaranteed tickets. If you make it to 6:00 AM on Sunday morning without missing more than one check in, you get your name entered into a drawing, and you then have about a 30% chance of getting tickets.

In order to make it worth people's while, the Duke PA Program pools all of their tickets together. So, out of 24 campers, if 8 people get tickets these are split up amongst everybody. But only the people that actually win the tickets get first pick of the litter. Which means UNC tickets. Just to let you know, tickets for the Duke-UNC game at Chapel Hill this year (not the one at Duke), are currently being sold for $5000 a ticket on stubhub.com.

Somehow, Rachel won. Meaning that with the UNC game, she will get probably 7 or 8 tickets. We can either keep the UNC game (meaning only one of us could go), or she could trade her UNC ticket with other people in her group and get probably like 6 or 7 tickets in return for this one ticket. Then we could both go together to a bunch of games. I'm not sure what we'll end up doing. It will probably depend on how often we feel like going.

I know a lot of you must be thinking, "Jeez, just sell the fricking UNC ticket. $5000?" Well, they don't actually give you tickets to each game. They give you a plastic credit card-like thing that you can only use along with your Duke ID card. So scalping really isn't an option.

So, Duke-UNC is arguably the biggest rivalry in college sports. I know Ohio State-Michigan football is up there, too. But when you have the two biggest college basketball programs in the country and they're only separated by about 15 miles of the 15-501 highway, it kind of pushes things to a new level. So whoever ends up going to that game, I think it will definitely be one of the highlights of our time in North Carolina.

So, we want to know, what would you do with that UNC ticket? Would you keep it and go by yourself? Or would you try and trade it for a bunch of other games so that the two of us could go together? Let us know.

Our neighbors, Joy and Tyler: