Solution found to help fans see big game

Tickets for next week's Fountain Valley-Edison game were offered for $55 Thursday on the Internet.

Those prices have just been substantially reduced.

After two dramatic days of people complaining about ticket distribution procedures for next Friday's Fountain Valley-Edison football game, the game has found a bigger home: Cal State Fullerton's Titan Stadium. That means around 2,400 tickets will be available at both schools soon. Information on ticket sales should be announced Friday.

Fountain Valley-Edison, the annual "Battle for the Bell" game, always is a big draw, but this year interest is sky high. Both teams were undefeated coming into this week, and both are in the Orange County top 10 (Edison at No. 1, Fountain Valley at No. 4). This looks like the best opportunity in years for Fountain Valley to beat arch-rival Edison, which has defeated Fountain Valley seven of the past nine Bell games.

Tickets for the game, originally at Orange Coast College, where seating capacity is 7,600, went on sale Tuesday at both schools and all tickets were gone by mid-afternoon.

Students, football parents, and many more who thought they should have a fair opportunity to acquire tickets were unable to, because of the rapid depletion of tickets at Edison and Fountain Valley. They complained, a lot, and Edison, the home team for the game, scrambled to placate them. Edison athletic director Bruce Belcher did a lot of work to find a solution, and secured Cal State Fullerton's 10,000-capacity Titan Stadium on Thursday evening.

When tickets for the Bell Game went on sale, they could be purchased in large batches; Fountain Valley reported on its website,fvhs.com, that one person bought 44 tickets and another bought 39. Four other purchases consumed 20 or more, and several more bought lower double-digit amounts.

Belcher said Edison also did not establish restrictions on number of tickets available per purchase. "In one case," he said, "someone came in with six different checks to buy tickets for six different people, people who could not be here to buy tickets. But to my knowledge, nobody came in and paid for 50 tickets at one time."

On Monday, before the public sale Tuesday, Edison students with valid student identification were able to get one free ticket per student.

Fountain Valley did not provide tickets to its students before its public sale, and Fountain Valley principal Chris Herfeld regretted that. If the school could go back in time ...

"We would offer tickets to the students first," Herfeld said. "We've done Bell Game sales like we did this year for over 15 years. Usually, the game only sells out on game day."

Many Edison and Fountain Valley parents were unhappy. They filled our ocvarsity.com blog comments, and our e-mail boxes, with their stories of disappointment and their suggestions.

Suggestion No. 1 was, of course, move the game to a larger venue. Moving the game at first seemed unlikely to happen, because of lack of availability of larger venues and, as Belcher said it, the desire to keep the event near the both schools' communities.

Angel Stadium (capacity 45,050) was eliminated as a potential destination immediately (past Bell Games have been played there). It takes weeks to get everything in place for a football game there – field preparation, security, so much more. The Angels were eliminated from the playoffs just this past Sunday, and with World Series Game 7 scheduled for Nov. 5 at the American League park, there was no way to schedule Angel Stadium for the Bell Game in advance (last week's Servite-Mater Dei was scheduled for Angel Stadium, with Santa Ana Stadium as a backup – and when the Angels advanced to the American League championship series, the site was switched to Santa Ana Stadium).

Cerritos College (capacity 12,000) was considered, too. But Servite has a home game there on Nov. 6, against Orange Lutheran. Belcher said that a Saturday game at Cerritos College was an unlikely option, because Friday is the best night for high school football and, again, the distance from the Edison-Fountain Valley area.

Titan Stadium at one point seemed out as a possible destination, because of expense and distance from the schools' area. CSF associate athletic director Rob Scialdone said the flat fee for a high school football game to play there is $2,000, but costs for custodial services, police and security, conversion of the field from soccer to football and back, can add upwards of $7,000 to that fee. The school, Scialdone said, has to put the needs of its own soccer teams first, and the Titans' men's soccer team has a game at Titan Stadium on Nov. 7, the day after the Bell Game, with the long-range weather forecast calling for showers on Nov. 6.

We at ocvarsity.com and our video partner iBN Sports even got involved. We offered to show a live webcast of the game. That would have required Orange Coast College to allow iBN Sports to use its Internet bandwidth. That wasn't set yet, but we were ready to keep pursuing that one. (Note: We will have information soon about whether iBN will provide a live video feed from Cal State Fullerton.)

The ticket distribution for the Bell Game could have been better. The way the folks at Mater Dei and Servite do it perhaps serves as a good model. The Mater Dei-Servite football game annually draws huge interest and heavy demand for tickets, too, and those schools have developed very organized methods for getting tickets to the right people and in the right proportions, too.

For last week's Servite-Mater Dei game at Santa Ana Stadium, Mater Dei's home game, Servite offered four tickets to varsity football players' immediate families, and two tickets each to junior varsity and freshman football families, and two to varsity cheer and varsity song families. Then Servite students with student ID were allowed one free ticket, and then students at sister schools Connelly and Rosary were offered one free ticket. Faculty at the schools got four tickets, and the remaining tickets were then offered to the general public.

At Mater Dei, students were given first crack at one free ticket per student, then Mater Dei parents were allowed to purchase four per family. Lists of family members, and proof of ID, were used to make sure that Mater Dei people indeed got Mater Dei tickets. The school also has football season-ticket holders for its home football games.

The Mater Dei and Servite methods, as thorough as they were, did not eliminate grousing from people who did not get tickets to last week's game that sold out in hours. But at least it made sure that students and the families of participating players had opportunities to get their tickets.

Bell Game tickets could be purchased at craigslist.com – for as much as $55 a ticket. I feel badly for somebody who bought those tickets, only to find out that more than 2,000 tickets would become available at both schools soon.

As for reselling tickets at such a high price, there is nothing illegal about reselling tickets for whatever the market will bear, as long as reselling is not done on the property of where the event takes place (that's why you see scalping across the street from Angel Stadium, Honda Center, etc.).

Principal Herfeld was very disappointed that tickets that should have gone to students and their families, or alumni, were being resold for profit.

"It's lousy that adults would take advantage of this scarcity to make a dollar off of a high school event," he said.

Now, those adults are back on the Internet, removing their greedy ads.