Red Carpet Experience More Than the Game

The Clyde Malone Community Center is about a ten-minute walk from Memorial Stadium. Step outside the center’s back door, cross one major intersection, and it’s a straight shot to gate 20 and into the stadium.

But for many of the center’s kids and family members, the distance between being inside Memorial Stadium or on the outside may as well be millions of footsteps away.

That was, until the rollout of the Red Carpet Experience.

The program, created and launched on the fly the week of Nebraska’s home opener against Fordham, has quickly made a positive impression in the lives of about 2,600 kids and their families, including about 100 kids from the Clyde Malone Community Center in downtown Lincoln who attended the Fordham home opener.

“Our kids got to experience the red carpet treatment,” said Stanford Bradley, the Malone center’s assistant director of teen programming.

In the two weeks since the game, Bradley said he is still hearing from parents thanking the center and the university for creating a positive family experience.

That’s a big part of the intent behind the Red Carpet Experience — to provide underprivileged youth who are eighth graders and younger with the opportunity to attend a Big Red football game for free accompanied by a parent or guardian, with a hotdog, soft drink, and popcorn thrown in.

Consider that under normal circumstances, the price of admission for a family of four, for example, could easily run several hundred dollars for tickets, parking, and food. That’s money many families on tight budgets with little give for entertainment would be hard pressed to come up with.

For the Fordham game, two donors purchased the remaining 2,400 tickets returned by the Rams so the athletic department could distribute them to kids. About 2,000 of those tickets were snapped up over four days as the athletic department scrambled to put the event logistics together to make the program work.

While most recipients were from the Lincoln and Omaha areas, some came from out-state — such as a group from the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska 100 miles north of Lincoln — and even from Oklahoma and Kansas, said Lawrence Chatters, senior associate athletic director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and the person credited with coming up with the idea for the program.

The following week for the Buffalo game, a donor purchased about 1,000 remaining tickets, which provided seats for about 600 kids and family members to attend, Chatters said.

Of course, the generous donations to the Red Carpet Experience also allowed Nebraska to declare sell outs of 86,000 for the first two home games, running its NCAA record string to 377 games. It should be noted that Memorial Stadium’s capacity has shrunk by several thousand seats, partly to ongoing widening of the bleacher seating in the south end zone, said Keith Mann, an athletic department spokesman.

Chatters said the athletic department wants to keep the program rolling through the remaining five games on the home schedule, assuming tickets are available, mostly from unused allotments normally reserved for visiting team fans. Therefore, there could be a rolling number of tickets funneled to Red Carpet recipients on a game-to-game basis.

Discussions are also being held about expanding the program for youngsters to attend other Nebraska sporting events, including women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball, Chatters said. Most importantly, some donors have expressed interest in supporting future events.

“We want to increase accessibility to athletic events,” Chatters said.

Bradley wholeheartedly agrees with that goal. “We want to make sure we can have that type of experience for more than just football,” he said. “It’s part of building a whole model of inclusiveness.”

That model extends beyond games, Bradley said. The Red Carpet Experience also gives kids from underprivileged backgrounds “an opportunity to see all that the university has to offer,” Bradley said. Those junior high and elementary school youngsters who toured the campus for the first two home games might become Nebraska college students down the road if everything clicks.

Indeed for the Buffalo game, admissions officers came over to Cook Pavilion — the staging area — to talk, Chatters said.

Nearly everyone who has attended a game at Memorial Stadium has a story about the experience. The Tunnel Walk, the red balloons, the fireworks going off, and yes, perhaps even a play or two from the game.

It was all that and more for the kids from the Winnebago Boys and Girls Club. After the game, there were photos with quarterback Adrian Martinez, and gear tossed their way by players, including a captain’s armband that a Winnebago youngster later proudly wore at his own football game.

About 65 boys, girls and chaperones made the 200 mile round trip from the Winnebago Native American reservation to Lincoln, hitting the road before 7 a.m. on game day and caravaning in three vans and several cars.

Marcel Blackbird, a volunteer with the organization, said he had tried in the past to buy tickets for a Nebraska game for kids in his community, but had been unsuccessful partly because of the number of tickets, the costs, and the logistics involved.

When he heard about the Red Carpet Experience the Tuesday before the Fordham game, he immediately contacted the athletic department. He got a response around 9:30 p.m. that night with instructions on what to do.

“The whole process was super easy,” Blackbird said.

He said the kids had a great view of the game from the south end zone opposite the jumbo scoreboard, and they stuck around the stadium afterwards to soak in the atmosphere.

Blackbird rated the experience for the kids a 15 on a scale of 10.

Blackbird hopes the athletic department expands the program to other sports. His next goal is to take a group of female volleyball players to the Devaney Center to watch Nebraska’s highly-ranked women’s volleyball team.

These types of events “can change kid’s lives,” said Blackbird. “It makes kids dream.”

Lawrence Chatters had only been on the job for about a month when he and the rest of the top administrators in the athletic department were given a major problem to solve by athletic director Trev Alberts: Come up with an idea on how to sell tickets remaining for the home opener against Fordham to keep the sellout streak alive. And do it quickly since the game was about one week away.

Chatters came up with the best idea and the name — the Red Carpet Experience. “The meaning behind the name was two-fold,” Chatters said. It represents a way to treat youngsters with celebrity status, and it’s a unique opportunity for families to attend a game.”

Before the Illinois game, Alberts mentioned the idea over dinner with a donor, Chatters said. By that Monday of Fordham week, the donor said he would take tickets, and there were other donors who had expressed interest, Chatters said.

With 2,400 tickets to sell at $70 per ticket, for example, that comes to a donation of $168,000 plus the cost of concessions.

The idea harkens to the days before the Bob Devaney era and the beginning of the sellout streak. Before then, Nebraska had a knot hole section to get fans into the stands with inexpensive tickets, especially kids and parents. Even Tom Osborne said recently he was a member of the knot hole gang.

A sold-out stadium year in, year out, makes it difficult to match those experiences based on supply and demand But the outlook changed this season when Fordham returned several thousand tickets, endangering the streak.

Once Alberts signed off on the idea, he and Chatters put together a video on Twitter and used other forms of social media to get the word out.

“We figured 250 to 500 people would reach out to the athletic department,” Chatters said. “Instead the floodgates opened. We got so many calls and emails.”

Fifteen volunteers from the ticket staff plus members of campus recreation scrambled to make the program work.

Chatters said seats were not necessarily in nosebleed sections, and were mostly spread around visiting team sections.

“We had a great view from the end zone,” Blackbird said. “They were really good seats.”

What’s next? Chatters said a number of season-ticket holders have contacted him about donating their unused tickets to the Red Carpet Experience. Likewise, a number of coaches including head volleyball coach John Cook, would like to see the concept expanded to their sports venues, Chatters said.

“The thing that is important to me,” he said, is kids “should have an opportunity to enjoy an experience like this with their family…these opportunities can create memories.

Steve Rosen covers the business of sports for HuskerOnline.com. Reach him with questions, comments, and story ideas at sbrosen@huskeronline.com.