• IU incorporated personal seat donations, but that hasn’t slowed the buying of season tickets or mini plans.

BLOOMINGTON — Indiana football rolled out a plan for 2025 single-game ticket sales this month that’s slightly different from what it was a year ago, but for good reason. 

The Hoosiers will play seven games at Memorial Stadium, including four conference opponents: Illinois (Sept. 20), Michigan State (Oct. 18), UCLA (Oct. 25), and Wisconsin (Nov. 15). 

Indiana staggered the availability of single-game tickets by opening up a pre-sale to donors June 10 and a “build-your-own” two-game bundle for non-donors that includes one nonconference and one Big Ten game. 

The program will make the remaining individual game tickets available to the general public July 8, nearly a full month after it opened sales for single-game tickets for the 2024 season. 

Indiana tweaked the schedule due to increased season-ticket sales following the team’s first appearance in the College Football Playoff under coach Curt Cignetti. 

“Ticket sales have been phenomenal,” Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson said in an interview with The Herald-Times. “Best I’ve seen in my long history, in terms of year-to-year improvement.”

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“Pack the Rock” movement showing no signs of slowing down 

Going into 2024, Indiana football’s ticket sales were up 10% in most categories, and Dolson was happy with those numbers, considering the Hoosiers were coming off a third straight disappointing season. 

The expectations changed amidst IU’s historic 10-0 start.

There was a stretch early in the year when Cignetti made the atmosphere at Memorial Stadium a weekly talking point. He urged fans to “Pack the Rock” and penned a letter to students encouraging them to stay for all four quarters in hopes of creating a more imposing home environment.  

Indiana fans responded by setting a single-season attendance record (386,992) that included four straight sellouts (53,082) to end the year.

That momentum carried into the offseason.

“We will definitely have sellouts,” Dolson said. “I don’t know if we will have sellouts for every game. I think we will be close, maybe closer than we’ve ever been in our history. There’s no question that Hoosier Nation has responded just how we hoped they would.”

Indiana football games becoming a hot-ticket item after CFP appearance

Indiana’s season-ticket sales are up 50% from last season, Dolson said. They were in the low 20s last season and are up in the mid 30s as the program prepares to open up single-game ticket sales. 

“It’s remarkable, even anecdotally, people saying to me they are legitimately worried about not being able to get a ticket,” Dolson said. “That’s what you want, to create enough demand where people worry about the supply. People are starting to worry about supply, and that’s a good thing.”

Explainer: Indiana football incorporates personal seat donations in 2025. Here’s what it means

The improved sales came after IU introduced a personal seat donation (PSD) program in February that raised season-ticket prices upwards of $250 per seat. The program is expected to generate $2.5 to $3 million in annual revenue as the athletic department looks for ways to cover revenue-sharing expenses.

“The personal seat donation, people understood,” Dolson said. “It’s never easy to increase prices and we’ve always tried to keep (ticket prices) modest and at market value. I do think people see the investments we are making and appreciate the results of those investments.”

Indiana’s biggest challenge in recent months has been figuring out the optimal number of individual tickets to make available. 

“We still want to maintain single-game opportunities because not everyone can come for a full season, and with an alumni base that’s one of the largest in the country, we want to accommodate as many people as we can, but what’s the right number?” Dolson said. “But those are awesome problems to have when you’ve been around a long time and had to find extremely creative ways (in the past) to generate the interest we want.”

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Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.

Indiana coach Stephanie White will miss her second game this season for personal reasons when the Fever visit the Golden State Valkyries on Thursday night in San Francisco.

The Fever (6-5) said White is tending to a personal matter, with assistant coach Austin Kelly serving as acting head coach for Indiana’s first game against the expansion Golden State franchise (5-6).

Kelly also served as head coach on 7 June, when the Fever beat the host Chicago Sky 79-52. White, 47, was attending to a family matter.

“It’s going to be the same,” Kelly said after Thursday’s shootaround, according to an ESPN report. “I think we are an extension of each other.

“The message is still the same that we talk about in the locker room: playing for each other, getting it done on the defensive end and then having that help fuel us on the offensive end. But the vibes are good.“

It is the first season of White’s second stint as Indiana’s head coach. She led the Fever from 2015-16 and returned after spending the past two seasons coaching the Connecticut Sun.

INDIANAPOLIS — During the months of June and July, you can help the Indiana DNR collect data about wildlife along waterways.

The Paddlecraft Wildlife Index started in 2020. This project utilizes volunteers who are already out paddleboarding, canoeing or kayaking. After paddling, volunteers fill out a short survey via postcard about the number and type of animals spotted.

One volunteer in the Paddlecraft Wildlife Index project is Erica Weddle. She operates Simply Fitness in Brown County. You can often find her leading group paddleboard trips on Yellowwood Lake.

“This time of year, probably three or four times a week,” Weddle explained about how frequently she is on the water.

Weddle says when she paddleboards, she encourages lake visitors to use all of their senses to really plug into their surroundings.

“Whether they’re feeling something, seeing something, hearing something, maybe it’s just something new and different for them,” she started. “Encouraging people to stop and think about all that and pause.”

She uses this mindset herself when paddleboarding. She says she loves animal watching, and seeing beavers is her favorite.

Attentiveness like this is useful when monitoring for animals to report back to the DNR.

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“Indiana DNR has a history of working with the public on data collection,” explained Andy Byers.

Byers is the Furbearer and Turkey Research Biologist for the Division of Fish and Wildlife and Nature Preserves. He explained how the program got started.

“There was this group of people that’s really passionate about the outdoors and were using Indiana’s waterways to get out and look for wildlife. We wanted to use that to our advantage,” Byers recalled.

Volunteers have been reporting their findings to the DNR with this project since 2020. Last year, paddlers put in more than 2,000 hours of volunteer work.

WRTV

“If I was going to go out and do that by myself, I would have to work 40 hours a week all year, just to collect that much data,” Byers said. “That’s a huge amount of work!”

Volunteers who are already out on the water are acting as the eyes and ears of the DNR to help keep an eye on animal populations.

With this survey, the DNR is specifically interested in 12 animals. They are watching for four mammals: beaver, river otter, muskrat, and mink. There are five birds: bald eagle, great blue heron, osprey, great egret, and kingfisher. There are also three types of turtle: painted turtle, red-eared slider, and Blanding’s turtle.

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Weddle took WRTV out onto the lake. Along the way, she was quick to point out the birds flying above, the locations where she typically sees beavers, and all the other animals she spotted.

“Today we saw some blue herons and a couple of turtles,” Weddle explained. “Getting people out on the water and in nature is key to my mission, but also to the DNR.”

The data on the postcard (the time spent on the water, the type of animals, and the number of animals) is used by many different departments in the DNR, not just for Byers and his team.

“We want to share this data with the other biologists that work for DNR who can use that for management decisions,” Byers explained. “We’re also sharing that data with property managers around the state so they can kind of see what’s going on with the land they manage.”

Byers shared that there are over 2,700 volunteers with the program all across the state. He said there are hotspots of volunteers in places like Brown, Steuben, and LaGrange Counties.

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You can participate in this program by sending a postcard from a single trip, or send multiple postcards if you’ll be out paddling multiple times throughout June and July.

You can find a link to volunteer in the Paddlecraft Wildlife Index here.

Once you sign up, the DNR will send you materials to get started, including the postcards that you’ll complete and send back to Byers after your paddle.

Byers is constantly combing through the data provided by volunteers. He hopes that now, in the program’s sixth year, he will be able to start seeing some trends developing.

WRTV

“The goal of this survey is to establish kind of a long-term data set that we can use to look at trends of these species,” Byers explained. “It gives us a really good idea of where in the state people are seeing these different wildlife species.”

Byers is thankful for volunteers like Weddle, and is hopeful that others who love the water will sign up.

“The more people that we have participating, the more data we get, and the more people get to get out and enjoy Indiana’s waterways,” Byers concluded.