When the spring football season kicks off, James Madison is planning to have at least some fans in the stands at Bridgeforth Stadium, according to Dukes assistant athletic director for ticketing and customer relations Mike Carpenter.
Under current Phase 3 state guidelines, sports venues can operate with the lesser of 50 percent occupancy or 1,000 spectators.
“A thousand is what we’re building toward,” Carpenter said Wednesday. “That’s what we were building toward in the fall before the season got truncated, so we had a pretty solid plan on that while focusing on our different groups. Our three main groups we want to accommodate are our guests of the program – families, students and Duke Club members.”
He said nothing will be decided and tickets won’t go on sale until the middle of January because coronavirus restrictions in the Commonwealth could differ between now and then. Only single-game tickets will be sold.
JMU doesn’t open its postponed grid slate until Feb. 20 when it hosts Morehead State at noon. The Dukes are scheduled to play five regular-season home games this spring.
“It’s similar to what we’re doing with basketball,” Carpenter said about football while standing on the floor of the brand new 8,500-seat Atlantic Union Bank Center as media members were taking a tour of the arena.
“But those are the three groups we’re targeting to get in there and divvy those tickets up to,” Carpenter said. “We wouldn’t launch anything until January because we don’t know how it’s going to change, but we would do a pre-order deadline for our Duke Club members. The specifics of the pricing, we’re still kind of holding off on because if we’re lucky and get a bigger [allowed attendance] number then that’s great, but they could also bring it back. So we don’t want to set false pretenses, but that’s what we’re thinking if it’s 1,000 [fans].”
He said keeping fans socially distant from each other and the playing field is a priority as well.
“That’s a physically spaced matrix,” Carpenter said. “That’s people spread all over the facility. We actually probably wouldn’t use the 100-level on the home side and we’d make that a buffer to keep away from the players. So we’d look at putting everyone spaced out. You’ve got plenty of room with 25,000 seats to space everybody and then have a student allotment, having them use the end zone to space out as well.”
In each of the last four seasons, JMU has finished in the top three across all of the FCS for home attendance. The Dukes drew 162,974 fans over nine games to Bridgeforth Stadium last year. And on the heels of winning the FCS national title in 2016, the Dukes were second in the country for attendance the following fall as 195,514 visited Harrisonburg over nine games in 2017.
The school has averaged 20,084 fans per home game since the start of the 2016 campaign.
