Red-hot tickets

On Thursday, University of Oregon basketball fans equaled red dots. Odd color for devotees of the team that dresses in yellow and green, huh?

“Red stands out,” said Kurt Zimmerman, senior director of development for the Duck Athletic Fund.

Zimmerman was seated on a kitchen counter in Nike co-founder and chairman Phil Knight’s Autzen Stadium sky suite, which will serve through Aug. 8 as the Men’s Basketball Selection Room, next to a large seating chart of the UO’s new Matthew Knight Arena, scheduled for completion in December.

Thursday was the first day in a six-week process for UO basketball fans who pay the most money, and have had season tickets the longest, to pick out prime seats in the most expensive college basketball arena ever built.

“All in all, it’s been pretty smooth today,” executive senior associate athletic director Jim Bartko said, right before the 34th and final seat-selection appointment of the day. Those seats, numbers 1 through 4 in row D of Section 103P (‘P’ standing for premier), went to UO alum and late-1970s track star Rudy Chapa, who phoned in his order from Portland.

Most of Section 103P, situated right at midcourt behind the players’ benches, was filled in with red dots by the end of the day.

Thursday’s 34 appointments for Legacy Fund donors (those who have contributed $25,000 and more to the fund established with the $100 million donation of Knight and his wife, Penny, to pay for construction of the new arena) filled up the first 794 seats in the $227 million arena being built on the eastern edge of the UO campus.

About 2,000 deposits of $100 were made by April 30 for seats in the 12,541-seat arena. The athletic department hopes they will equal about 6,000 season tickets. That would be about 1,000 more season tickets for men’s basketball than sold in McArthur Court for the 2009-2010 season.

Legacy Fund donor appointments go through July 8, Bartko said. Starting on July 9, other fans who put down deposits will get their five-minute seat-selection appointments through Aug. 8, based on the point system measured by money donated and years of holding season tickets.

Once in the selection room, Legacy fund donors have 10 minutes to pick out their seats after first viewing seating charts — and seeing what seats have already been taken — in a waiting area on the east end of the sky suite level at Autzen Stadium. There, they can also watch a live webcam feed of fans currently making selections before proceeding to a check-out area on the stadium’s west end to — what else? — cough up some more deposit cash.

Single-game tickets will go on sale once all the appointments are complete sometime in early August and the season schedule has been finalized.

Those who don’t get the arena’s best seats will still be able to buy season tickets for men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball then, too, Bartko said.