‘The last great ticket pull’

   

As the new tent policy for ticket pull rolled out last Monday, the guidelines left some students not only frustrated and adjusting for the future — but worried for the already-existing community.

Braving the sweltering heat, “diehard” ticket pullers began camping out last Saturday, Aug. 17,  two weeks before the opening football matchup between Texas A&M and Notre Dame. Biology senior Noah Franklin was the first to get a part of the action, setting up at 3 p.m., followed shortly by industrial engineering senior Jimmy Morefield.

“I had planned this a month prior to me actually doing it, and I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to start that Saturday before,’” Franklin said. “I didn’t realize that other people were playing chicken just like I was. If I had seen someone else’s tent out here I was going to go home — rush home. I would have skipped work to do it.”

And that’s exactly what Morefield did. When he drove by Kyle Field and saw Franklin pulling his tent out of his bag, he went back to his apartment and loaded up. 

They began camping for days on end — soon enough, the “tent city” was growing. But after sleeping less than a foot from the ticket windows for days, the campers were met the following Monday with Student Affairs administrators telling them to unblock the fire lane and informing them of new rules. Tents must be free-standing, pools and cooking devices are no longer permitted and, most impactful of all, campouts can only begin at 6 a.m. the Sunday before ticket pull. 

The campers were informed the rules wouldn’t apply to this first game, so they persevered. A few students opened up a “little party square,” and throughout the tents, they set up TVs, fans, turf grass, the Guitar Hero video game and drums, as well as dehumidifiers and an inflatable couch that has been compared to the iconic “Friends” couch.  

Hailey Spencer, Class of 2024 — and inhabitant of the tent with turf grass and Guitar Hero — is not new and certainly not over this tradition.

“I just come out here for the vibes,” Spencer said. “I like still feeling the Aggie spirit, even though I’ve already graduated. We all have a big ticket group with an Excel sheet, so I just come help out whenever I can.” 

As a night shift nurse, she helps fill in for her party when others have class or need to take a shower.

“We all take trades,” Spencer said. “We’ll be like, ‘Okay, I’ve been out here, and I need to go shower.’” 

Although some go home to freshen up, others take advantage of the university facilities and use the Student Recreation Center, like Franklin. 

“I’ve been sweating for the past 12 hours,” Franklin said. “What do I do to clean off and not be the musty guy in a class? Some people like myself and one of my other buddies will go to the rec and shower there.”

To campers like Franklin, committing to ticket pull means putting everything they have into it. He has a duffel bag of clothes and a vanity bag, staying prepared and quoting Farmers Insurance: “We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.”

Seeing a thing or two also applies to the lore behind the decades-long tradition, from the “list eater” to hot tubs. The new policy banning hot tubs and pools isn’t random — it’s because it’s already happened. 

“I think it was like a 150-gallon inflatable hot tub,” Morefield said. “They brought a really big cooler in a truck and they used five-gallon buckets to move all of the water out of the truck into the hot tub.”

And the “list eater?” It’s true. It happened in 2004 when two people “cut in line,” back when students used to keep track of the line with a paper list.

“My understanding is people kind of looked out and saw that she was standing in line and they were like, ‘Does she not know how the list works?’” Morefield said. “The list leader for that window went up to talk to her and she took the list for that window, crumpled it up and put it in her mouth, and there’s a debate on whether she spit it out afterwards or swallowed the list.”

According to a Good Bull Hunting article, she ate it.

“After that, because they lost a whole list for the window, I guess they lost all that information,” Morefield said. “The people kind of lost trust in the system, and then after that, it kind of just faded out.”

Fast forward to the present day, and securing seats has only become more competitive. By the weekend before ticket pull, nightlife in the tent city was in full swing. Playing spike ball and poker and crowded around TVs, most campers were eager for Monday morning’s arrival. 

“Tickets are first come, first served,” Franklin said. “It’s not something that we’re just doing to own the whole ticket pull thing. We’re here because we want our tickets, and if they want to come and join us, there’s more than enough room in tent city. It’s a great place to build a community. It’s a great way to meet friends. We all sit around and have fun.”

Franklin maintains another tradition — he and a group of friends gather around the Reveille statue and do the War Hymn the midnight before ticket pull. The night before Aug. 26, other campers joined them from their own tent as they sang.

Though the campers band together to have fun, they’re all technically competing for tickets. That competitiveness showed Monday morning with “the cram” — a push for the ticket windows that lasted five hours. At 5 a.m., campers began clearing tents and pushing each other to their final goal. Some, like animal science senior Jaxson Zimmerman, wish the university had prepared better.

“Without the student body, football games would be much, much, much different,” Zimmerman said. “You can’t tout that you have the best student section in the country and not try your best to accommodate.”

Zimmerman and his group started camping out last Monday evening, a week before their classification ticket pull. He said he believes the recent rule change is one of the worst decisions administrators have made. Instead, Zimmerman says, they should integrate technology into the mix.  

“There’s no reason why somebody that should start camping three days after I do should end up with better tickets than me just because of luck,” Zimmerman said. “If they’re really wanting to be fair, they would do it the right way… [That] we can’t implement [technology] here is kind of baffling to me.

“If they don’t think that — especially for the Texas game — that something’s not going to go wrong and somebody’s either going to get run over, somebody’s going to get in a fight, because there will be issues with that, they’re crazy,” Zimmerman continued.

The current system ensures fairness, Zimmerman said. The lengthy, hard-working process is a “part of it,” and while it’s stressful, students have found ways to accommodate themselves through methods like shifts. 

“If it means something to you, you’ll go through, and you’ll take all the actions necessary to be able to camp and have all types of effective communication and coordination,” Zimmerman said. 

Morefield shared the sentiment, saying the new Sunday policy might encourage students to “wait in line for a line.”

“I don’t know if the university has really accounted for that,” Morefield said.

While diehard campers don’t want the — sometimes — lengthy tradition to change, they’re cooperating with the university’s wishes and waiting to watch the season play out. 

“It’s just showing how redass we are,” Franklin said. “We love this, and it’s a tradition that we don’t want to end. I understand that the university is having to change the regulations, but it’s also something they don’t want to see ending as well because they enjoy seeing us out here.”

Recent ticket pull camps have created a community within a community that many don’t see dying off, no matter the regulations. 

“There’s no one else in the United States or the world that does it like Texas A&M does, and nobody will ever understand that,” Zimmerman said. “It is entirely unique and as cliche as it sounds, ‘From the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. From the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.’ That perfectly encapsulates what this is all about. You might not get it, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to respect it.”

 

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