A decision made this summer by the Rams Club, UNC Ticket Office and UNC Director of Athletics Bubba Cunningham opened up some valuable real estate in the Smith Center ahead of the North Carolina men’s basketball team’s 2018-19 season.
A bulk of the sports media — who, since the 2004-05 season, have taken up a few rows directly above the risers in section 116 in the Smith Center — will move into the stadium’s upper bowl, and the seats made available by this reorientation decision have been sold to Rams Club members.
This decision will generate a net annual income increase of about $400,000 for the UNC athletic department, said Steve Kirschner, UNC’s senior associate athletic director of communications.
John Montgomery, the executive director of the Rams Club, said people who make contributions to the University’s scholarship endowment obtain the right to buy seats in the Smith Center, and then the Rams Club uses a percentage of those returns to help fund scholarships.
“We're always looking for new revenue opportunities, especially when that revenue opportunity can impact our ability to offer more scholarships for our student athletes, and we’re looking for those opportunities at the Smith Center and Kenan Stadium all the time,” Montgomery said. “So anyway, this one just seemed like a very good opportunity that could have immediate returns for us and for our scholarship program.”
Montgomery clarified that this decision did not take away any student seating.
Kirschner said the only way to make available these seats for fans while keeping the media in the lower level would be to cut into seats reserved for students — which was something Cunningham did not want to do.
“We have been looking at how we can create more lower-level inventory, and there are just not many ways to do that in this building,” Kirschner said. “I knew we were heading in a direction where we were going to move them out of section 116, so I was talking like, ‘Well, we could move them to, you know, this back corner of the lower level,’ and everywhere I had an idea, there were student seats. And Bubba said that we’re not going in that direction.”
Anders Pokela, the public relations chairperson of Carolina Fever, UNC’s official student fan organization, said this decision does not promote the main mission of his organization, which is to make the student section as large and effective as possible.
