If you think about it, tickets are very powerful items. If you show the right people a little slip of paper, a world of opportunities opens up to you. These paper opportunities vary from riding jet planes to getting into Disney World. In the case of some tickets, you are granted access to a basketball game in Hilton Coliseum. In the case of some rare tickets, you are allowed into an area of Hilton where you can actually see the players.

However, if tickets are not used for their specific purpose, they become utterly useless.

I say this because of the 45 minutes of my life that I wasted walking around holding four tickets in the air trying to sell them. I saw only one sale. Fortunately, it was my sale. Unfortunately, I saw my tickets, face valued at $20 apiece, go for $25 for the entire lot. However, (back to the fortunate side) they weren’t really my tickets so I didn’t lose the $55. The tickets belonged to a friend of mine whose buddies bailed out on him at the last second. The only reason I was scalping them was because I was promised 10 percent commission on the sale, which turned out to be a whopping $2.50.

Although I rarely saw money exchanged, I saw a lot of tickets change hands. Something in the heads of these scalper types moves them to feel that although the guy they traded an arena circle ticket for couldn’t unload these five balcony seats, they will have no problem doing just that. Apparently, they believe their innovative technique of yelling, “I got TICKETS!” over and over will surely facilitate a quicker sale.

Of course, balcony seats are nearly impossible to sell, but yet they are usually the only tickets scalped.

This situation is created by the fact that the university takes pleasure in screwing its most loyal fans (and its most likely scalpers). This unlucky group is made up of primarily students but is also complimented by a healthy mix of alumni not yet wealthy enough to donate any money to the university.

If you watch a Kansas or Duke home game on ESPN, I guarantee you will not see a bunch of old white guys in suits sitting down in the courtside seats or behind the baskets. You see genuine insane diehards for the respective school you are watching. You see guys who are not afraid to apply war paint to their bare chests or wear cut-open half basketballs on their heads.

And do you know how these lunatics happen to get these seats? They paid dearly for them. They set up camp sites outside their ticket office and slept there in shifts for days to get courtside seats. This system is absolutely perfect because it actually rewards the true fans. It rewards guys who would flunk out of school to get good seats, except that they know that if they aren’t students, they can’t get student tickets.

These very same seats are reserved for only the extremely wealthy at Iowa State. You have to donate upwards of $3,000 a year to get close enough to snag a shirt after a Jerry Curry long ball. You can’t tell me that a person who can afford to spend that much money per year on donations to ISU is going to make as much use of those seats as a guy like… hmmm… let’s say me.

So if you aren’t rich, your only chance of getting good seats is to be luckily placed in one of the very scarce arena circle blocks available to students (where I just happened to be this year for the Kansas game). Most students I know, however, never even get close enough to see that Ed is old as dirt.

So what can be done to remedy the problem? I say simply free up some of those all-coveted donor seats and make them into single-game students seats.

These seats would be available on a first-come first-served basis at the Jacobson Building 48 hours before game time. Lines for the tickets may begin anytime after the last home game is over. This would be in addition to student season tickets. If you stood in line for a single-game ticket, your regular seat would be forfeited and sold to the general audience.

This might lose a little revenue for the athletic program, but it would make Hilton an even more favorable playing atmosphere for our basketball teams. And it would make it a heck of a lot easier to scalp tickets. Not that I’d ever sell an arena circle ticket away after sitting in a pup tent outside Jacobson for a week. Now that would be true lunacy.

David Roepke is a freshman in journalism and mass communication and astronomy from Aurora.