Fans Balk as Northern Kentucky Basketball Implements Major Price Hike for Season Tickets

Northern Kentucky University basketball fans will be paying a lot more for the privilege of seeing their team play next season, after the school significantly raised prices for season tickets. 

According to the Northern Kentucky Tribune, NKU has implemented what it is calling a "seat equity plan," meaning season ticket holders will see the price of attendance more than double. 

Denny Egan, who played for the first-ever NKU basketball teams more than a half-century ago and has had season tickets – now at midcourt — “since a year after I graduated,” told the Tribune that he won't be renewing according to the new plan.

“It’s not a financial decision to me,” Egan says. “My four season tickets cost me between $1,000 and $1,200.” But an additional $400 a seat assessment for his tickets in the third row would be an additional $1,600.

“It’s a bad business decision (for NKU) and I’m not supporting that,” Egan said. “They’re beating up the people who have been most loyal.” The NKU rep he talked to “told me I could move down to the corner (with no additional cost) but I’m not doing that.”

NKU’s associate athletics director for development, Bryan Allen, disagrees.

“We feel it’s a very reasonable position,” Allen said of the three new levels of seat increases — $400 a seat, $350 and $250 – for three middle sections on each side of Truist Arena, which Allen says are the result of consultation with what NKU considers “benchmark” Division I programs, including Wright State.

“We’re not charging what people in our area are charging,” Allen says which is certainly the case for the two major programs in the Greater Cincinnati area. A comparable season ticket at Xavier last season, when the Musketeers were coming off a season with 11 sellouts and fans could see a Big East schedule of two-time NCAA champion UConn, Marquette, Creighton, Seton Hall, St.John’s, Butler, Georgetown and Providence, offered a comparable seat for $650 plus a premium of $1,500 a seat."

Allen said the school is moving forward with the plan, and that there will still be 18 sections at Truist that won't see an increase in ticket prices. 

The ticket renewals have yet to go out and won’t be due back until the end of July, Allen says. And there will be “installment plans and extended payments through the end of December . . . we know it’s hard.”