COVID-19 changed how Decatur High School approached highschool sports. Contact tracing, screening, masks, and limited fan attendance were some of the changes. With this came the addition of GoFan, a third party ticket provider where you purchase and keep high school athletics tickets directly on your mobile device. This elimited buying paper tickets directly at the studium. 

GoFan benefits the athletic department at Decatur High School. And with the recent, booming success of the DHS football team, tickets have become a much hotter commodity.

“Since everything is online with GoFan, it gives us a more accurate and more efficient accounting method.”  DHS Athletic Director Rodney Thomas explains.  “It also cuts down on the number of gate workers we have to pay for home games.  GoFan greatly streamlines the ticketing/financial process (For DHS).

GoFan eliminated many aspects of the gameday experience, one of which was “Five Dollar Football.”  Pre-COVID, the Athletic Department created “5 Dollar Football.” These were 5 dollar, student-only tickets to the home football games. They were sold in the cafeteria on Fridays. Friday mornings on gameday, it became tradition for the morning announcements at DHS to include the “5 Dollaaa Footballl” jingle.

“When you hear over the intercom ‘Five Dollar Football’, it just makes you estatic and more excited about the upcoming game,” DHS Junior Luke Dreesen explained.

Many students wondered where the discounted tickets had gone. With the full switch to GoFan, ”Five Dollar Football” is now extinct.  GoFan charges 8 dollars a ticket for football games, along with a 1 dollar “service fee.” That is a 4 dollar increase in ticket prices for students at DHS.

“High school students are broke and can’t pay for $9 [tickets] every week,” Dreesen said.

Rodney Thomas explains that although the Athletic Department CAN set ticket prices, “Discounted tickets were taken away because GoFan cannot set a $5.00 price just for students. Tickets at that price would be available to everyone who went online during the window of time.”

This means that there would be no way to stop fans from sharing the 5 dollar ticket link with non-students. This would be incredible loss of revenue for the Athletic Department, and thus the safer and more effective option was eliminating it all together.

“In essence, there is not a way to limit $5.00 tickets to only DHS students,” Thomas states.