How Nebraska volleyball’s stadium match sold 80,000 tickets

One’s opinion likely hinged on how early they arrived in the virtual “line” on the online ticket platform. Some customers smoothly got what they wanted. Others experienced major frustration and were not able to get tickets as easily as they’d hoped.

Some were initially met with this message: “Unable to secure seats in this Price Level.”

In the end, nearly 83,000 tickets were sold Tuesday and Wednesday, a significant accomplishment by fans and the staff at the Athletic Department.

Selling out quickly came as a surprise to some fans and Nebraska staff, but they had prepared for the massive demand.

The ticketing software vendor added extra resources, going from one computer server to handle the traffic to seven.

“Overall it went well,” said Brandon Meier, a senior associate athletic director who is one of the organizers for the stadium match.

“I think like any concert you’re trying to process that many folks, so there was a little delay,” he said. “But I’d read, ‘Hey, their system crashed.’ No. The system didn’t crash. It just takes a while. We were on seven different servers.”

In order to give fans seats as close to the court as possible, seats in the South Stadium were not initially available for purchase. However, Nebraska knew that may be needed, and soon, the South Stadium was open for business, too.

“We really just had to open up the South, which took a few minutes,” Meier said.

Nebraska didn’t block off a lot of rows of seats to accommodate a post-match concert with a yet-to-be-announced national artist. The stage configuration isn’t finalized, but event staff is looking at a setup where the stage is visible from all areas.

The “Volleyball Day in Nebraska” event on Aug. 30 includes the Huskers’ match against Omaha and a Wayne State/Nebraska-Kearney exhibition preceding it.

One recent change to the setup will come as good news for some spectators. In a change from the initial rendering, the court footprint has shifted to face north and south, just like the football field. The center of the court will be near the 20-year line in North Stadium.

That change will accommodate TV cameras for the national broadcast and also offer a better view for fans.

Make no mistake, though: When the floodgates opened to the general public at 10 a.m. Wednesday, the ticket system faced a massive undertaking, but thousands of fans were accommodated.

“In the next 1½ hours there was roughly 50,000 tickets sold,” Meier said.

The ticketing process may have been slower than the 2021 Garth Brooks concert at Memorial Stadium because many customers had already inputted their credit card information into the system.

For the volleyball match the remarkable thing is there were not even many single tickets to be purchased scattered through the stadium, which is often the case.

“We had people buy one to 12,” Meier said.

Holly Adam, the director of ticketing for the department, expected a large demand.

“Most of the sections in North, East and West Stadiums were available from the start, but we wanted to open up the best available sections as ticket sales progressed to make sure sections were sold out before new ones were opened,” Adam said in a written statement to the Journal Star.

“The demand was so intense that we had to catch up with opening more sections as it became clear by late Wednesday morning that every section would be sold into. We also had to be mindful of the fact that fans may have had tickets in their cart that were not yet purchased and that we opened new sections in a way that those fans didn’t lose what they were in the process of buying. Overall, our ticketing software performed quite well given the magnitude of traffic we experienced.”

There were tickets held for high school and club volleyball teams to attend together as well.

“From the beginning, we wanted to include as many youth volleyball teams as players as we could,” Meier said.

There were also seats saved for the bands from the participating schools.

The Athletic Department waited until Thursday afternoon to announce a sellout to avoid confusion for UNL students who hadn’t yet had their chance — and students wanted in, too.

Student tickets claimed so far are 2,352 for UNL, 355 for Wayne State and 229 for Nebraska-Kearney. There are tickets for Omaha, but the claim process hasn’t begun.

More tickets may be available after the concert setup is final.

“(Athletic Director Trev Alberts) has us looking at all areas of the stadium to say, ‘Hey, we may not sell these on a normal football game, but are there areas that we can utilize to get as many people in as we can?” Meier said.

After the dust had settled on ticket distribution, Meier reflected. He thought about how all of those people got tickets before they even knew what the concert will be.

“I think in hindsight it worked out really well that we didn’t release the artist,” he said. “We didn’t want people to say, ‘Hey, the reason you sold it out was because of the concert and the artist.’ So we plan to release the artist in early June. The people bought it for volleyball.”

After the match was announced, just how large the crowd might be varied by who you asked.

It was the same over at Memorial Stadium.

“I’m sort of with (coach) John Cook,” Meier said. “After the initial press conference, I just sensed a feeling like, ‘Oh, my, gosh, we’re going to try and do our best to sell this out.’

“But I would be lying if I told you that any of us thought we would get to a complete sellout in two days.”