Students Seeking Basketball Tickets Face Technical Troubles

In a season when men’s basketball tickets are hot commodities and game results are followed nationally, it may be no surprise that school spirit at Harvard has picked up substantially. But who’s the Crimson’s biggest fan?

That would be David B. Faux, Harvard's manager of software development, who (we assume) unknowingly registered for about 800 men's basketball tickets this afternoon. When students logged on to my.Harvard to purchase tickets for Penn or Princeton games, they found themselves registering under the name “David Faux.”

A quick call to the Harvard Ticket Office gave us this information:

“Hello and thank you for calling the Harvard Athletic Department Ticket Office. We are aware of the situation with online registration for Harvard undergrads for basketball tickets. We’re working to rectify that situation with our IT department. Please, when you log in, please go ahead and make the submission request for the ticket even if the name that appears on the site is different than yours. You will receive instructions over the next day or two as to what to do next. Thank you.”

Most students would not have realized the universality of issue had it not been for the frequent Facebook event messages from Kai-Cheng Ho ’10, a senior running back for the football team.

Ho said that the IT workers had been using a random name to check out the system during an experimental phase. “They forgot to take it out when the system was running," he said. "‘David Faux’ is just a little error; it’s not something to worry about.”

According to Ho, students who registered for a ticket under the name David Faux should have few problems picking up their tickets.

“The way you register is by providing your ID and password,” Ho said. “That information is kept; you show [your] ID to match your ID number and pick up your ticket.”

For Ho, the technology glitch is a sign of increasing school spirit, something he’s been working closely with the athletic department to promote.

Cheng told us that the tickets for the Princeton were sold out in less than an hour and a half. "It was more traffic than they could imagine," he said. "It’s a great problem to have.”

And if the men’s basketball team keeps winning, it may be a problem that could continue for a while.