I was excited. The entire week leading up to the Georgia Tennessee game, I couldn’t get my mind off of it. Saturday morning, I got to the gate early, where the crowd built over cruelly slow hours of waiting to enter the stadium.
As excited as I was about the game, I couldn’t help but think one thing the whole time I stood at the gate — this isn’t safe.
When I arrived at gate three by Reed Plaza around 10 a.m., it felt almost picnic-like — people sat with groups of friends sipping Starbucks or eating Chick-fil-A. But this calm energy at the gate dissipated quickly, after about an hour or so, we had to get on our feet as more and more people pushed into the small quad. By noon, we were stuck — trying to get in or out of that crowd would’ve been a serious undertaking — and we still had another hour and a half of waiting for gates to open at 1:30 p.m.
As someone who has anxiety in big crowds, I tend to catastrophize. I’ll dream up the worst case scenarios, the “what ifs.” What if someone in the middle of the crowd needs medical attention, and help can’t get to them? What if people at the back of the crowd try to push in even more? What if there is an emergency?
On top of my anxieties, my thoughts went back to a series of crowd-related catastrophes from the last year. Saturday was also the one year anniversary of the tragedy at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival in Houston, where a crowd surge caused the death of 10 and many more to be injured. At the start of October, a stampedeat a soccer match in Indonesia left 125 dead. At top of mind was the recent crowd surge in South Korea, where over 150 people died, including a Kennesaw State University student. More than 80% of the dead were in their 20s and 30s, according to an article from AP News.
I reassured myself that things would be fine. And ultimately, they were. We got in, got our seats and got some food. Later on during the game, I had some of the most euphoric experiences I’ve ever had watching football. I told myself it had been worth it. Nothing too terrible happened at the student gate, and I got to experience one of the most energetic games in Sanford Stadium’s history.
But even with the great memories from Saturday, I can’t shake the feeling of being trapped in the crowd at the gate. Sure, hundreds of concerts, sporting events and other large gatherings happen every week with no crowd-related disasters. But the idea that these events go off without a hitch shouldn’t be reassuring to the University of Georgia — we may just be lucky. The university needs to take some serious action in crowd management.
Finding a better way
Refining UGA’s approach to crowd control at football games shouldn’t have to be a huge undertaking, even though it needs to be a huge priority.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with student football tickets at UGA, students are issued a general admission ticket that will either get them in a reserved section of the stadium’s north stands or the West End Zone. From then on, seats are first-come, first-served. This is part of the reason students are so eager to get to their gate and get inside the stadium. It’s not the same as having a designated seat and strolling in 30 minutes before kickoff.
I don’t think UGA should do away with the first-come, first-served seating. But I think it could be managed better. At gate three, students form individual lines (if you can even call them that) behind each entrance, where normally one or two ticket scanners are stationed. Can you imagine if you were at the Kroger self-checkout and people formed lines behind each individual register? It would be chaos.
One relatively inexpensive option UGA could try is creating one long, winding queue (picture the line for Goliath at Six Flags), and once students get to the front, they go to the first ticket scanner available. At the student gate, this would create an environment that is more orderly and efficient, not to mention safer. The Georgia Institute of Technology game during Thanksgiving weekend would be a good time to do a test run of a new student gate procedure, considering it probably won’t have the same crowds and hype as last weekend’s matchup.
The school already has what they need to implement this — event staff can just rearrange the moveable gates already in place on game days. But even if the school or the UGA Athletic Association had to fork out some dollars for additional movable gates or increased security, it’s the organization’s responsibility to do so. Something has to change.
I’ve seen questionable crowd management at UGA football events before, like at the Notre Dame game my freshman year, when student ticket holders were forced to leave the stadium by police officers and event staff, according to a September 2019 Red & Black article. At the national championship celebration in January, foot traffic came to a standstill on Sanford Drive as huge crowds tried to move into the stadium following the parade.
You would think that crowd safety would be a priority since unmanaged crowds create a huge safety risk and liability for UGA. But the school has proven to me time and time again that crowd safety is not on its list of priorities.
All week, UGA encouraged students to arrive at the gates early, to show up and be loud. We delivered. Now, it’s time for it to deliver on creating a safer, more enjoyable gameday experience for us all.
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November 09, 2022 at 12:30AM
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OPINION: UGA must take crowd management seriously | Opinion - Red and Black
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