If you aren’t a fan of walking to the box office at the Whittemore Center to claim your UNH athletics tickets, then fear no more.

UNH athletics has officially launched an online system that allows students to claim tickets for all UNH athletic events. With this in place, students and fans can now skip the box office entirely and print out copies of their UNH ticket right from their place of residence.  More importantly for students is the opportunity to download tickets directly to a mobile device to get into events.  This not only saves time, but, according to Senior Associate Athletic Director for External Affairs Jon Danos, is also more convenient for the fans.

“We’ve never liked the idea of having students only walk to the [Whittemore Center] to grab their tickets; I mean that’s inconvenient,” Danos said. “Now we have the ability and we’ve since introduced this idea of all undergraduate students, who pay the athletics fee as part of the tuition package, to go online and activate an account.” 

Fans must create a unique account with a username and password in order to be eligible to claim tickets online. A temporary password will be given to the claimer via email before making a password of their own, if they so choose. By entering a student email address, students will be automatically recognized by the system and have the price waived.

To set up an account, fans can visit the UNH athletics webpage, unhwildcats.com, and click on the “tickets” tab in the top left-hand corner. From there, fans are directed to an exclusive ticket website. Click on the “student ticket setup” icon to set up an account and you can then browse options for upcoming UNH athletic events. 

“It’s something that I understand that athletics has been trying to get over the top here for some time,” Danos said. “The strategy starts with how do we provide more value to all of our ticket buyers? So we just went to work.” 

Discussions took place with both the UNH IT department and UNH Student Senate to create an effective model for online-based ticket claiming. Plans were put into place to go beyond just a convenient printing method, and also to provide the option to download tickets onto mobile devices.

“It would have taken a few hurdles to get to the point of print at home, but we said ‘no, that’s not good enough,’” Danos said. “That’s where we had more hurdles, and our ticket partner literally just built a system. So we are really happy that we were able get over that [hurdle].”

According to Danos, the launch was “overdue.”

With many mainstream ticketing websites now converting to an online-based system, the time for UNH to step up to the plate and create a system of their own had come. The website officially launched on Thursday, Jan. 26 and the system was off to a fast start. Over one third of the tickets claimed at the UNH men’s hockey game vs. Providence on Friday, Jan. 27 were claimed through the online ticket service.

UNH Student Body President Jonathan Dean believes that the shift to an online ticketing system is a step forward for UNH athletics.

“People are online now. Students have been asking to try and address the need of getting more students at the games,” Dean said. “Whenever I talk to student athletes, I ask ‘What’s the biggest thing you want?’[and] they say ‘for students to come our games’ and now we are doing it.”