Illinois student group gets nabbed in ticket caper
It’s one thing to be creative or sly to attend a game against a rival. It’s another to pretend to be a charity, play the victim and then double down on your dumb decisions.
That is what an Illinois student fan group did this week, Yahoo Sports and other outlets reported.
The incident started when an Illinois student group called the Orange Krush posted a lengthy news release on social media. The group planned to travel to Iowa City for Saturday’s Illinois-Iowa men's basketball game.
The Orange Krush said the University of Iowa invalidated the tickets it “legally purchased.” The 150 students who were set to attend said they raised about $2,649 for a local charity (a little more than $17 per person) to be invited on the trip.
The cancellation of tickets forced the Orange Krush to stop its charter bus rentals, reportedly costing the group nearly $6,000.
The posting drew immediate condemnation on social media, with many blasting the Hawkeyes’ decision to cancel the students' tickets.
However, the Orange Krush didn’t tell the whole story. The Hawkeyes released their own statement that said it became aware of a discounted ticket order for the game on behalf of the Illinois Chapter of the Boys and Girls Club.
Iowa staff followed up and found that wasn’t true, and the people involved admitted to falsely ordering the tickets under the nonprofit.
Iowa refunded the ticket order and donated the tickets to an Iowa chapter of the Boys and Girls Club.
The new statement changed the mood online, with ire turning to the Illinois students. It’s one thing to be sly and get discounted tickets. It’s college, and a little bending of the rules, or gamesmanship, by rivals is to be expected, but to falsely pretend to be a charity to get discounted tickets is a step too far.
Many of the Illinois student group doubled down on the fraud. The Orange Krush has pretended to be other groups in the past to get tickets, otherwise it would have been denied seats at the rival's stadium, according to WCIA.com and other reports.
Kilton Rauman, vice president of Illini Pride, the umbrella organization for Orange Krush, "said Thursday the group routinely uses an assumed identity to buy tickets for its annual road trip to an opponent arena. The reason, he said, is that he would expect an order from a group that cheers for the visitor and heckles the home team would be rejected," according to an Associated Press report shared by WTTW News.
There's one word for this: shameful.
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