Most of the 63,168 people in attendance for Cals season-opener against Nevada went home disappointed.The much anticipated reopening of the renovated MemorialStadium was marred by a 31-24 upset loss to Nevada.But some of those 63,000 had an extra reason to gripe. Cal sold as many as 100tickets to seats that did not exist.We r aware of problem & apologize. Correcting 4 nextweek, Calathletic director Sandy Barbour tweeted Sunday in response to complaints onTwitter about the nonexistent seats.Ashwin Puri, Cal associate athletic directorfor sales, marketing and service, told the San Jose Mercury News that theproblem applied to no more than 100 people and stemmed from misestimates in thenumber of seats that could fit in bench-seating sections.Every stadium comes up with manifested number of seatsprior to building being finalized, Puri told the Mercury News. It wasnt aguessing game. It was based on conversations we had with the constructioncompany.Puri said that while it is easy to correctly estimate thenumber of chair-back seats, approximating the number of tickets to sell forbench seating creates a greater possibility for error.As seat numbers were put on the benches late last week, Cal realized sections V,UU and U were more narrow than had been anticipated, Puri said.Calplaced customer service representatives in each of the affected sectionsSaturday to relocate fans who had purchased tickets to the nonexistent seats.Caldid not have a chance to hold a test event before Saturdays game that wouldhave revealed the issue. The renovations to Memorial Stadium, which cost 321million, reportedly fell behind schedule.Puri said Cal was workingto fix the problem before the Golden Bears next home game, Saturday against Southern Utah, and that some of the ticket holders hadreceived upgrades to higher value seats.We are proactively reaching out to every affected ticketholder to solve this, Puri said. We want to make sure every one of our fansis happy.
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