Last season, San Diego State officials bemoaned shrinking student attendance at men’s basketball games after turnstile counts at Viejas Arena had plummeted from an average of 1,614 per game four years earlier to just 784.

This season? The opposite problem: too much demand.

The online system that distributes student tickets was overwhelmed and had to be reset Wednesday morning, with more than 5,000 people at one point trying to access 2,500 seats for Saturday night’s game between the fourth-ranked Aztecs and Utah State that has the added attraction of Kawhi Leonard’s jersey retirement.

And given the high demand, some students appear to be selling their tickets on the secondary market despite university policy prohibiting it. On Friday afternoon, StubHub was offering general-admission student tickets ranging from $114 to $500.


Tickets in reserved sections started at $162 for the upper benches and topped $1,000 for some courtside locations.

“It’s a hot ticket,” said Steve Schnall, SDSU’s executive associate athletic director who oversees ticketing and marketing. “Students want to go to this game in droves, and there may be some trying to monetize it. We are very fervent about what our policy is, and we will adhere to that policy tomorrow.”

Students no longer camp overnight to collect a paper ticket from the Viejas Arena box office, as they did when Leonard’s 2010-11 team also opened the season 20-0 and climbed to No. 4. Instead, everything is done exclusively via mobile phone.

Students can claim one free ticket for themselves and buy one guest ticket for between $10 and $20, depending on the game. For football, the guest ticket is transferable. For men’s basketball, that feature is turned off on the online ticketing portal.


Your guest, then, must enter the arena with you since both tickets are sent to your phone.

“Do I think people haven’t realized the fine print and are going to try to sell their ticket? We’ve seen it,” Schnall said. “But we are letting people know that our policy is our policy – it’s nontransferable and it’s on your phone. That’s our system and we’re going to stick to it. If somebody tries to do something, if they try to scan in (with a transferred ticket), they would be turned away.”

And what if someone sells a screen shot of the ticket bar code, which is electronically scanned for entry?

“It has a certain look on the screen,” Schnall said. “If it has anything that looks differently, it won’t scan in.”


SDSU, however, does not require a student ID for entry in addition to the mobile ticket, mostly out of expediency. The lines would be too long, Schnall says.

Despite the issues with the online ticketing system and the headaches of fans potentially purchasing nontransferable student tickets on the secondary market, they are good kind of problems to have – too much demand being preferable to not enough. Last summer, Schnall estimated that they had lost 10 to 15 percent of their season-ticket base after not reaching a postseason tournament for the second time in three years.

Saturday’s game will be the sixth straight sellout at Viejas Arena after two in the previous 30 games.

“It’s the hottest ticket I can remember, and not just Aztecs,” Schnall said. “What was the last time there was this kind of demand in town: World Series for the Padres, playoffs for the Chargers?”