The roar of the Maravich Maniacs will be coming from a new direction next basketball season.
A plan to move the student section and set a Tradition Fund for season tickets was passed Friday by the LSU Board of Supervisors, according to Associate Athletic Director Eddie Nunez.
The 350-seat student section will move from mid-court to behind the goal at the east end of the PMAC.
Nunez said a motivation for the move was to improve the atmosphere of the student section.
“We are trying to make our arena have as much of an impact as possible for our teams, giving them more of a home-field advantage,” Nunez said. “We want to increase the excitement and bring them closer to the court.”
Nunez said the change puts LSU on par with the student sections of other Southeastern Conference schools.
“We did some research to see where most schools had their student sections,” Nunez said. “We decided the end zone is where most schools had it.”
Nunez said there will be new seats where the old student section was located, and the new student section behind the east goal will also feature new seats.
“We’re having to replace all of our seats,” Nunez said. “We didn’t want to tackle the whole project with the limited time we had last year.”
The new plan will change season tickets to model the Tradition Fund of football and baseball season tickets.
Tickets for men’s basketball would change to a flat rate instead of being based on the number of home games multiplied by the ticket costs.
Season ticket holders would contribute to the Tradition Fund for the right to purchase season tickets, ranging from $50 for upper-level corner seats to $750 for lower-level mid-court seats.
After securing a ticket, the season ticket holder would buy a ticket plan ranging from $100 to $250.
Nunez said the Athletic Department is still working on a way to slowly implement the new ticket prices.
“The plan was approved, but we have to provide them a little more information for it to be 100 percent approved,” Nunez said.
Nunez said the price hike could bring in around $600,000, which would be used to fund the new basketball practice facility and help with the upkeep of the PMAC.