If you have any interest in buying season tickets and attending Florida State’s home opener against Alabama, today (Thursday) is the deadline for existing season ticket holders to renew their season tickets, to avoid a terrible disappointment come August.

If you are a 2024 ticket holder and miss the deadline by a day or two, call your ticket representative immediately.

For readers who are not yet season ticket holders, the good news is you will have an opportunity to order season tickets once the existing season ticket holder deadline is past and they have been seated.

Let’s attribute it to PTSD. Two decades of work at Seminole Boosters tells me there will be disappointed existing ticket holders this August – those who don’t act by the deadline -- and I hope this article will keep at least one of our readers from being among them.

This year’s deadline is much different than those previous deadlines.

During the decades I was with Seminole Boosters, the ticket office and the Boosters would send countless letters, postcards, newsletters and emails to season ticket holders reminding them of the deadline and the seat selection process. The ticket representatives would make countless phone calls, not to mention texts sent, asking ticket holders to renew. Eighty percent of the ticket holders would comply but every year there would be nearly 2,000 who would miss the deadline.

Each year, about 30 days before the deadline, Seminole Booster President Andy Miller would ask me for the list of non-renewed donors and he would require every major gift fundraiser to drop whatever they were doing in order to call their donors on the list, even though the donors had been hounded by their ticket rep.

Generally, about half of them would renew but it was not uncommon to go into August with 800 accounts still unrenewed. And it was not uncommon for those donors to call us after tickets had been mailed, asking why their tickets were put on hold.

With a smile we’d say because you haven’t renewed your tickets. Then we’d take their payment and mail their tickets.

But that process simply can’t work this year.

With Doak undergoing a reseating in 2025, ticket holders have to renew by April 10 – today – and select their seats or there will be no seats on their account to hold.

It’s very simple to understand and to do but, mark my words, there are people who are so busy with life that they’ll miss, or ignore, these messages and then call the Booster office in August about their seats. If seats are still available, they’ll be able to buy them, but what they will have to select from won’t be nearly as good as what they could have selected if they met the deadline for this priority deadline today and selected from the best seats.

If any of our readers have any questions about their account, please don’t wait to call your ticket representative. Call them today.

If the ticket representative can’t answer your question to your satisfaction, ask for their manager, Mark Cameron, who is the Director of Ticket Sales, or email me at jkutz@theosceola.com and I’ll get you with Mark who can provide the right answer.

If you are reading this a day or two after the deadline, call anyway. There will be a period of a few days when they will be able to accommodate you.

“We’ll use next week after the deadline to clean everything up before running priority points for the seat and parking selection in May,” Cameron said.

Seat and parking selection are expected to start in early May – the exact date to be determined -- and will wrap up after about three weeks.

“After (the priority selection process is complete) all remaining seating will be open for first come, first serve season sales to the public,” Cameron said.

It is remarkable to me that Florida State has held these seats exclusively for existing ticket holders this late into the year. Athletic director Michael Alford has shown an uncommon commitment to trying to find a seat for every existing ticket holder affected by the stadium renovation, and uncommon patience to sell these seats, especially those on the west sidelines.

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