ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Kathy Parmentier was prepared for this … sort of.
A couple of summers with the Buffalo Bisons and several winters with the Sabres in their respective ticket offices were perfect preparation for her career.
And she traveled the Little Three route to do it.
A four-year basketball player at Niagara University, a graduate degree from Canisius College and a job at St. Bonaventure.
Now, in her fourth year as SBU’s Ticket Office Manager, Parmentier had pretty much seen everything … until this men’s basketball season.
A combination of the lingering fallout from coronavirus and the Bonnies starting the campaign ranked in the Top 25 of two national polls, during a compressed time frame, have made her position busy to an unprecedented extent.
WITH BONA returning five senior starters and the preseason favorite to claim a second straight Atlantic 10 title, the normally brisk demand for tickets exploded.
After selling 2,621 season tickets for the 2019-20 season, the number ballooned to
2,825 this year, 30 of those after sales supposedly closed in September, 12 of them FOLLOWING the Bonnies first home game.
And individual game sales have already affected three key meetings as the matchups with Buffalo (Dec. 4), Duquesne (Jan. 21) and the Alumni Weekend pairing with Saint Joseph’s (Jan. 29) have only single seats remaining — and few of those — with no pairs.
“This is new to anyone and everyone that we’re all living through this,” Parmentier said. “The (men’s) ranking should be the (only) adjustment, but coming off all of the Covid stuff and having to make those adjustments first has just made it crazy.
“For those late season tickets, which came after individual game sales began, finding the same ticket for them was tough … we were going game-by-game trying to find the closest seats. They have season tickets but they’re not the same seat … at least they get the (season-ticket) price, which is what they were looking for.”
She admitted, “It’s been insane. Everything was pushed back because of Covid and renewals, which we usually start in June, didn’t start until August and that coincided with season-ticket sales. The whole process, which is normally three months, was crammed into three weeks.”
BUT THERE was one break for the ticket office. Instead of the usual Flexpack, St. Bonaventure added the Wolfpack.
It’s a five-game package while students are on break: Northern Iowa (Nov. 27), Fordham (Jan. 5), Saint Louis (Jan. 8), VCU (Jan. 14) and Richmond (March 4).
“The bigger games (other than Fordham), come when the students aren’t here, so we were able to open extra seating and that’s the only reason we’re not sold out,” Parmentier said.
And it’s not merely home games which have Bona nation fired up, there’s also the Charleston (S.C.) Classic which starts tomorrow afternoon against Boise State with subsequent games on Friday and Sunday at times and against opponents to be determined.
“It’s amazing,” said Parmentier, who will be there to handle tickets. “There will be between six or seven hundred Bona fans there with pregame receptions Thursday and Friday and a dinner/booze cruise Saturday.”
ONE MAJOR change this year is the rules for seating in the Reilly Center’s student section.
“Students now have to have their own ticketed seat and because of inventory, I had to kick season ticket holders out of two sections to put the students in,” Parmentier explained. “In recent years, we’ve averaged 660 students per game. But there were times we’d get 1,000 jammed in their section.
“Now they have to claim a (free) ticket online though they don’t have a technical assigned seat. There are 300 in the main section, 120 each in the weight-room and Hall-of-Fame end zones and 158 each in the Section 2 and 13 overflow areas. We needed that because student tickets sold out the first two games.”
OF COURSE, there’s long been confusion about the RC’s capacity.
For years, the figure was 6,000, but that seemed a mere estimation. After some reconfiguring of the lower level seating, that number was revised to 5,480.
However, that’s not tickets available, it’s bodies in the building including game staff (security, ticket takers, ushers etc)..
“A sellout for us is 4,617, that’s what I can sell,” Parmentier said. “There are (complimentary) tickets for visiting teams, (Bona) faculty and staff, students … that’s where the capacity of 5,400 came from.”
And this year, those 4,617 seats have become almost priceless.
“Bona fans are just a different breed,” Parmentier concluded, “they’re always fired up, it’s just amped up this year.”
(Chuck Pollock, an Olean Times Herald senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)
