Students sell Lehigh-Lafayette 150th rivalry game tickets as prices soar

A growing number of students have been selling their tickets for the Lehigh-Lafayette game as the event approaches.

Richard Haas, director of sales and marketing at LU Athletics, said the ticket turnover is natural and expected. Because most students bought their tickets last spring for the event this semester, a strong secondary market has formed as students change their mind about going to the rivalry game.

Some students sold their tickets to turn over a profit and to save the $30 bus fee, while others lost interest in the game or realized they could not attend.

“I bought my ticket before coming to school, then I joined the marching band, and I don’t need it any more because we are performing [at the game],” Kerstin Schkrioba, ’18, said.

Other students sold their tickets because of conflicting Lehigh priorities. One such student, Yara Hanna, ’17, said she is selling her ticket because she has an exam the following Monday.

“I would love to go to the game, but I’m afraid of not being able to do well on the exam,” Hanna said.

Many students who have sold their tickets for profit, however, said they were not very interested in college football and had friends who made a large sum by selling their tickets.

“I saw that I could make a good profit since some people are willing to pay well above the price I paid for it,” Farren Leung, ’18, said. “Plus I would have had to buy a transportation ticket, which is $30. That’s almost the price of the ticket itself.”

Although students post frequently online about buying or selling tickets, Haas noted that, on StubHub, only about one percent of the 4,000 seats in the Lehigh student section were up for sale. As of Friday, there were just 411 tickets for sale in the entire stadium, which can hold over 48,000 people. That means just a tenth of the ticket re-sales for the game are among Lehigh students.

A wide variety of alumni and fans who initially bought tickets are also changing their minds.

“While I do believe that students are selling on campus, the net is the same,” Haas said. “There is no rush to dump tickets.”

Haas said students and alumni call and e-mail the ticket office every day and are directed to the secondary market, where buyers and sellers organize private transactions in person or using social media. The 150th rivalry game has the largest demand of any Lehigh Athletics event ever, and there are enough people on just the ticket wait list to fill Goodman Stadium.

Furthermore, because the Lehigh-Lafayette game will be operated no differently than a Yankees game, ticket sales are forbidden within 1,500 feet of the stadium. Because of this, students who wait until the day of the game to sell or buy a ticket will face a great deal of trouble with making transactions.

Because Yankee Stadium controls the official ticket process, Haas urges students to keep their ticket in a safe place and remember to bring it to the game.