There’s mountains, seven professional sports teams, fraternity and sorority events and downtown Denver to chose from, but DU hockey has still managed to sell out their past 52 home games.
“They are an unbelievable team, have an unbelievable coaching staff and great national success always helps sells tickets and other programs wish they were as successful as DU,” said Matt Evans, Director of ticket sales and box office operations.
There have been numerous factors that have all had their part in contributing to the sell out streak. The fact that the Pioneers won back to back National Championships in 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 never hurts put people in the maroon colored seats.
Also just a couple years ago the NHL had a lockout during their season and the Colorado Avalanche fans found and some fell in love with DU hockey to replace the missing flying pucks and speeding skates at the Pepsi Center. Finally and probably most importantly DU offers the Denver and surrounding communities’ quality, fun and exciting hockey to watch at a reasonable price.
At an Avs game it costs $126 and above to sit in the first five rows while at a DU game it costs less than that for a family of four to come to Magness at just $24 a ticket in the same seating range.
The cheapest ticket at an Avs game is $21 while DU sells their lowest priced at just $17.
“There are great price points within the program and for the community to see the level of hockey we are playing is a great value,” said Evans.
There are three types of tickets that Evans and the DU athletic staff sell for every home game. Those are season, group and walk-up tickets.
“Having a strong season ticket base is key to any ticket model, it helps lessen the pressure on walk-up and group sales,” said the fourth year employee of DU.
Season tickets have continued to grow year after year and the ticket staff now offers full season and Friday night packages for the public to watch exciting and nationally ranked college hockey.
Walk-ups have also been successful do to the great marketing done by the athletic staff marketing department. For weekends against teams like Wisconsin, Minnesota or Colorado College Evans and the marketing staff know they will get a strong amount of walk-ups without advertising. For weekends against teams like Minnesota State, Michigan Tech or Niagara, advertising in local papers and radio stations is key to help get the numbers of walk-ups to enable a sell-out.
In particular during the latest hockey storms the marketing and ticket staffs have really had to work hard to sell tickets before the games, because they knew there walk-up numbers would be low because of the weather.
Also another reason the streak has reached the hefty number of 52 has been because of the great youth hockey community and group sales.
“The local youth hockey programs are booming and especially the youth DU programs,” said Evans.
The ticket staff has created an initiative where youth hockey programs are given 100 tickets to sell to DU hockey games and in return get a portion of the money for their youth team.
“To be able to get a large number of youth players in our building, it is a win-win situation on both sides,” said Evans.
Sell out crowds have not just shown up for the hockey program, but women’s gymnastics and men’s lacrosse have been receiving similar success the past couple seasons.
For example a sell-out crowd of 2,224 and the second largest regular season crowd in gymnastics history came out last Saturday in Hamiliton Gymnasium in their victory against No. 7 UCLA.
It has been no different for the men’s lacrosse team who saw a sell-out of 2,051 watch their upset of North Carolina last season during the Pioneer face-off classic.
“Lacrosse and gymnastics are niche sports. The great thing I got going is Monroe and Kutcher-Rinehart do a great job marketing their program. They hold numerous camps throughout the off-season, building up that season ticket base, and get us to that point were we are selling out events,” said Evans.
The success of the DU teams has been in part to the sell-out crowds, as men’s lacrosse finished 9-0 at home last season, and gymnastics is currently 3-0 performing at home and hockey is 12-5-2.
