COLUMN: Seat Savers – A real pain in the…Sorry, this is saved
10,381: The highest attendance at a USU basketball game in 20 years, and still there were empty seats at a sold-out game..
Wait a minute; that can’t be right. After all, I saw people standing in the aisles. There couldn’t possibly have been an empty seat in the entire Spectrum. Sure enough, there were. How could that be possible? Oh, that’s right. It’s called seat saving!
Don’t get me wrong. I am perfectly OK with saving five or six seats for friends who won’t be there until game time. My problem is with those who arrive three hours early and reserve row after row for their friends, some of whom won’t arrive until the game’s half over. The game against UC Irvine was one such occasion. My friends and I arrived at the Spectrum about 90 minutes early. A few of our friends would be arriving later, so we decided to save them some seats. Unfortunately, two of them didn’t arrive before the game started, so their seats were forfeited to someone else. That’s only fair, right?
Not everyone tends to agree. A couple of rows in front of us eight or nine students had the same idea. As soon as they got there, they began pulling down seat after seat, covering them with coats. I counted about 18 in all. My friends and I watched in amusement as they turned away those who attempted to fill those seats. At game time, several of those seats were still empty. The group guarded them vigorously until they arrived, forcing many agitated fans to stand in the aisles.
Call me crazy, but that just doesn’t seem fair. Saving rows of seats for people who don’t even arrive on time at the expense of people who do is not only unethical, it’s selfish and childish. It’s basically sending the message that unless we know certain people we need to arrive at the game hours early just to get a seat.
Once again, I see nothing wrong with saving a few seats. But if the people they’re being saved for don’t arrive within 10 or 15 minutes of game time, it’s only right that they should be forfeited. Take my friends for example: A few of them go to every home game and arrive about an hour early. Sometimes I’ll ask them to save me a seat. They respond that it depends on what time I arrive. One of them was blunt with me and said, “If you arrive at 6:30, you deserve to get a bad seat.”
That may sound a little extreme, but we all have priorities. True, there are those who have prior commitments that prevent them from arriving early. I myself have a class on Thursdays that ends at 7 p.m. But that doesn’t entitle me to a reserved front row seat while people who arrived before me stand in the aisles, uncertain if they’ll be able to sit down before halftime.
Therefore, I propose a solution: If we’re saving a seat for someone and they don’t arrive within 15 minutes of the game, that seat is fair game. That means if someone else wants the seat, they deserve it and should get it. In addition, we shouldn’t be allowed to save rows of seats just because we arrive two hours early. There are others who arrive two hours early, so they deserve a good seat as well.
We all need to remember that we’re not the only people who want to see the Aggies enjoy their best season ever. So let’s act like the mature college students that we are and keep the seat saving to a minimum.
Matthew Andersen is a junior majoring in technical writing. Comments can be sent to mattandersen@cc.usu.edu.