The partnership now requires all attendees at Rowan Athletics events to purchase tickets online. (Rowan Athletics)
Rowan Athletics has partnered with the digital platform HomeTown Ticketing to be its official ticket provider at all of its home games. All of their ticket sales will now be cashless.
Game tickets went digital at the start of the 2025-26 season, allowing Rowan Athletics to have the ability to engage with Profs fans and provide them with an accessible trip and experience at hometown competitions. Students will still be able to obtain free tickets despite the new ticketing system. They can now reserve a digital game pass for Rowan Athletics events online.
Part of the motivation for this change came from the athletics department’s desire to keep up with the shift in sports adoption of digital ticketing following COVID-19.
“Our fans have already shifted to that mentality for postseason competition over the past couple of years,” said Shawn Tucker, director of athletics. “We figured that it was the best time for us to move to a cashless system and utilize a platform that many of our fans’ parents and alumni are familiar with.”
This digital ticketing option offers group passes at different levels, ranging from $25 to $50, and is also able to track information to share and provide discounts to customers. HomeTown Ticketing also assists Rowan Athletics with gathering information for students to communicate with them about upcoming events, raffles, and opportunities for fans to engage with student athletes.
“We will look to hopefully have other opportunities for inviting fans onto the field, and we are going to be using this platform to be able to do so,” Tucker said. “There’s a lot of great features with this, and it also syncs very well with everyone’s mobile pay.”
With the addition of this new platform, it has changed the way faculty and staff get tickets to sports games. During the previous seasons, faculty and staff received athletic passes for regular-season events that were available to them free of charge. Now, if interested in attending a game, they have to purchase a ticket at each game or purchase season passes.
For Noah Weinstein, who works as a program assistant in the university’s Academic Success Center and is also dubbed Rowan’s No. 1 sports fan, he has found that this new partnership has shifted things for faculty and staff.
“Since I’m faculty and staff, we used to get staff passes for the games, but that is no longer the case,” Weinstein said. “So now we have to get tickets each time we go to the games or get a season pass for men’s soccer, women’s soccer, and football, because you don’t need to buy tickets for field hockey or volleyball.”
This fall sports season, Weinstein purchased the Profs’ season passes. He hopes that this new ticketing platform will help the Profs’ fan experience evolve.
“With how this will enhance the fan atmosphere, hopefully more fans come to the games,” Weinstein said. “It looks like it’s working with soccer and football being packed, but if they do move to other sports, hopefully it helps the other sports get more fans.”
While some fans find the new platform and features helpful, other students find this change to be troubling for those who like to purchase with cash at games.
“It’s kind of frustrating, especially seeing how many parents and students are accustomed to buying tickets on arrival,” Lindsey Rawding, a junior communications major, said. “I can see the appeal, but it definitely rocks the boat.”
Rowan Athletics plans to have more sports teams in the winter utilize the HomeTown Ticket platform to sell tickets to their sporting events. Additional features will be added to the platform, including a merchandise shop with apparel and concessions stands inventory.
“We’re looking to getting into concessions on the app,” Tucker said. “We’re gonna have our own team store on the app, so there’s a lot more features that are available there, you know, hopefully down the road as things start to iron out. We can also use it as a fundraising platform if our teams have unique initiatives.”
With the athletics department’s hopes in store to increase attendance and ticket sales, the team will continue working to add new attributes in the app. With time, the app will be able to collect more information on those who use the app to engage with users on a personal level.
“We’ve already seen an uptick in men’s and women’s soccer too, so we anticipate more [crowds],” Tucker said. “One of the greatest values is the data that we’re able to retrieve and the engagement that we’re having with our fans after games and during games.”
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