Virginia Tech announced today that 1,500 season tickets are being made available to the general public, indicating that season ticket sales are on a record-shattering pace for the 2002 football season.

Last week's edition of hokiesportsinfo.com the newspaper reported that at press time, 28,000 season ticket renewals and orders had been received from Hokie Club members, "with three days of mail left to be open." That figure alone indicates that season ticket sales are on pace to break the record of 30,254 set for the 2001 season.

If you take the figure of 1,500 season tickets being made available to the public today (previously, only Hokie Club members could order tickets), you can work your way backwards and estimate approximately how many season tickets have been sold thus far ... and how many might be sold overall by the time they're done.

Some figures to work with:

• On the hokiesportsinfo.com web site, stadium capacity after the South end zone expansion is listed at 63,459.
• As recently as the 2000 season, Virginia Tech reserved 17,000 student tickets, and 4,450 "corporate, contract, promo, and sponsorship tickets."
• Approximately 6,000 tickets (maximum) are being reserved for road opponents. LSU, Virginia, West Virginia, and Marshall may use that allotment, but it is unlikely that Arkansas State, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, and Temple will. Any unused opponent tickets are made available to the general public as single-game tickets.

Putting those numbers together (along with the 1,500 season tickets available to the public today) gives:

If the additional 1,500 season tickets are sold, that could result in 36,000 season tickets sold, easily beating the figure from last year.

Obviously, that number may or may not be close to the actual figure. The student ticket and corporate/promo ticket totals given are two years old and may not be accurate anymore, and the visitor/single game ticket totals are unconfirmed and could be as low as 4,000. Season ticket sales might get as high as 38,000 this year.

Those ticket sales mean that big bucks are flowing into the VT football program before the first football is kicked off in the fall. If you compare this year's projected totals (we'll use the figure of 36,000 tickets) with totals and prices from years past, you can see that season ticket revenue continues to boom at VT.

Tech's 4th-seeded softball team shocked 1st-seeded Notre Dame on day one of the Big East tournament 8-3 last week, and then knocked off 2nd-seeded Villanova on day two, 3-0.

This put the Hokies in the championship game of the double-elimination tournament, where they again met Notre Dame. Needing just one victory in two games for the championship, the Hokies fell in a double-header, 2-1 and 3-1.

Sadly, the Hokies, who finished 42-18 and had a 12-game winning streak before falling twice to Notre Dame, did not make the 48-team NCAA Tournament field. Notre Dame was the only Big East team to get an invitation. Next year, the field expands to 64 teams, but that's one year too late for this season's Hokies.

In other news, the unranked Tech men's tennis team won in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, knocking off #23 UNC. Tech then fell to #5 Tennessee in round 2.

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