A sea of gold filled Hilton Coliseum on Monday night for Iowa State’s matchup with No. 6 Kansas and the crowd didn’t lack any students who attempted to gain admittance.

“No students were turned away,” said ISU athletic director Jamie Pollard in a phone conversation with the Daily on Tuesday. “Every student that was in line that stayed in line got into the game.

“We would never know if anybody just left, but anybody who stayed in line got into the game.”

The student section at Hilton Coliseum has a capacity of 2,500 and the half-full mark of 1,250 was only surpassed twice last season. Those games were against Iowa and Kansas, and the student capacity still only reached 52 percent and 51 percent.

So after an average 42 percent of students used tickets last season, the ISU athletic department sold 3,500 student tickets this season. That brought the risk of running out of seats for a big game such as Monday’s national TV appearance against Kansas.

“We thought KU would be a game that we were in the mode to turn people away and refund them, but we were able to figure out how to not do that,” Pollard said.

The student section did fill up Monday, but with around 100 students still waiting outside, officials made the decision to allow standing around the lower bowl, something that typically isn’t allowed at Hilton.

Pollard added that the athletic department wouldn’t know if a student left the line without attempting to enter. Had students been turned away, the protocol would have called for their student IDs to be scanned so they could receive a refund.

Overall this season, Pollard said the overselling of season tickets went better than expected.

“Last year we averaged about 42 percent of tickets distributed were actually used,” Pollard said. “This year — I haven’t seen the average after the KU game — prior to the KU game was about a 50-percent average.”

That 50 percent is of the 3,500 total, meaning the student average at games this season was around 1,700 students per game prior to Monday compared to just more than 1,000 last season. Pollard said the student section typically filled between 60 and 70 percent of its 2,500 seat capacity prior to Kansas.

“For the big games this year we had more students in attendance than any game last season, including the KU game or the Iowa game,” Pollard said, noting Monday’s totals weren’t available.

Pollard said the athletic department will learn from the surge that happened when the doors opened, but was pleased overall.

“We’ll learn from that for the future to not have that kind of issue from a safety standpoint,” Pollard said. “By and large [the game] confirmed for us that the process worked throughout the season better than anyone thought it would’ve. The student crowds throughout the year were phenomenal.”