Brisk ticket sales for East Carolina football

from Jim Modlin at Gold’s Gym:

East Carolina Passes 20,000 In Football Season Ticket Sales

Less Than 2,000 Remain as Pirates Push to Top 21,000 for Third-Straight Year

GREENVILLE, N.C. – With the start of the Pirates’ 2009 football season less than two months away, the East Carolina University Athletics Department has eclipsed the 20,000 mark in season ticket sales for the third-straight year and will now set its sights on reaching sell-out status for the second time in the Skip Holtz era.

ECU has less than 2,000 season tickets remaining before exhausting its annual allotment of 22,000 that are available for purchase each year. While Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium’s capacity is officially listed at 43,000, the remaining tickets are reserved for visiting teams, students, players and coaches.

Due to the demand, the ECU Athletics Ticket Office also announced Thursday that there are no individual tickets available for the Pirates’ season opener against Appalachian State Sept. 5 and most likely will face a similar situation for the Virginia Tech contest Nov. 5.

In addition to the matchups with the Mountaineers and Hokies, popular designated contests against UCF (Family Weekend) and Rice (Homecoming) will also be anticipated sell-outs which would require a season ticket as the only guaranteed means of admission.

Individual home and away game tickets, with the exception of Appalachian State and North Carolina, are now on sale for Pirate Club members only, while individual tickets for the Pirates’ four Conference USA home contests will go on sale to the general public beginning August 10 at 9 a.m. Tickets are priced at $40 for adults and $25 for youth 12 & under.

East Carolina has established program attendance records in back-to-back seasons under Holtz. ECU drew a total of 249,219 fans in 2007 before setting a new single-season average standard with a Conference USA-best 42,016 clip in 2008. The increases have been a reflection of success at the box office in Holtz’ last three years, following a then-record of 16,318 in 2006 with a 22,000 sell-out number in 2007 and a 21,315 total in 2008.

Tom McClellan
Assistant AD/Media Relations
East Carolina University