Written by Melissa Colopietro

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Janet Grafft and Shelley Slay from Iowa City Schools about their experience with MSB Tickets. Janet and Shelley work in the business department and used MSB Tickets for one of their district's biggest sporting events: The Clash at Kinnick.

The Clash at Kinnick is the first high school football game in over 45 years to take place at the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium. In this annual rivalry matchup, Iowa City Liberty and Iowa City High played under the lights with lots of cheering fans from both teams. Find out more about the event in Iowa City’s own words below:

We saw the newspaper article about the big game; it seemed like such an incredible event! Do you mind telling us more about it?

Shelley: We have three high schools here in Iowa city that compete against each other. Our principal and athletic directors thought it would be neat to have one of our crosstown rivals play at Hawkeye Field at the [University at Iowa]. The university was very accommodating and said yeah, let’s give it a try. It was a great experience for the kids. We had the Liberty students, the Liberty parents, the City parents, and the City student section. It was amazing!

Janet: Our local ABC network even broadcasted it across eastern Iowa. And we sold t-shirts called Clash at Kinnick, and I think they’re donating $4,200 to the St. Children’s Hospital. They had sales during the game, but then they also opened it up afterward because there was so much interest.

That's wonderful! Do you know how many fans were in the stadium?

Janet: I would say it’s between ten and twelve thousand. 

Oh wow, that’s a lot of people. How was your experience setting up and managing such a big event with MSB Tickets?

Shelley: I had no problems. It was quite smooth on my end as far as getting it set up [in MSB Tickets]. And the principal wanted to know - almost several times a day - how many tickets we sold. So I just logged in, showed him the graph, and he saw everything. So on the back end, it worked great. 

That’s great to hear. How would you normally sell tickets for an event like this?

Janet: We would have been just all cash. I can’t imagine if we physically sold 10,000 tickets in cash, it would have been a huge mess.

Is that why you guys decided to switch to an online platform?

Janet: We use MySchoolBucks for our meal payments and for our online school fees. So it just kind of encapsulates everything [with adding MSB Tickets].

How did you get the word out for this event?

Shelley: When I put the event on MSB Tickets, I send the event link to our athletic director and she puts the link on our calendar. So families can go there and get tickets.

Oh, that’s great. We would love to know what makes you excited about using the MSB Tickets platform?

Janet: The thing that makes me excited is getting rid of the cash. I'm in finance, and [with cash] it's miscounting, it's misplacing, it's stealing... [Without cash] everything goes away. It just goes away. I like not having [to issue] paper tickets and the extra cost of the tickets, and it's just so easy to scan. Being in finance for way too many years, mistakes happen at [entry] gates. People tear off too many tickets, then they're short, or they tear off too many, and then they're really short. I mean, it's just not a good system. And the less cash we use, the more secure.

Shelley: You’ve got some people that prefer to just not carry cards with them and would rather pay cash.

Janet: When people did come in, we didn’t have scanners to scan credit cards. Instead we put up a picture of the QR code, and people who want to pay by card scan it and get their [ticket] online.

We’re really glad it worked so well for you! As we wrap up here, we'd love to hear what your favorite part of the game was.

Shelley: After the first quarter at the Hawkeye games, they wave at the kids up at the Children's Hospital. And so both teams got to do that. And I'm sure there were plenty of families up there with their kids watching as well.

Janet: Yeah. Have you ever seen the wave at the Iowa game? The whole crowd turns, and the children's hospital is, what, maybe five years old, and it's the closest part of the hospital. It's like, right across the street from the stadium. And so they go up to the top floor and they can see the whole stadium. So everybody turns right after the first quarter and waves to the kids that are in the hospital.

Thank you to Janet and Shelley for telling their school's story and sharing the success of their big game! It's remarkable to see how schools can bring together a community to rally around the students and families that encompass it. We are looking forward to hearing about more events in the future. Go Little Hawks!