We have all been in this situation: the next men’s home basketball game is going to be a good one. The visitors will be a tough match up, but you are excited to see your favorite player land some threes, shatter some ankles or dunk on some fools.

Your Villanova gear is selected. You’re strategizing with your buds on what time to show up, and best of all, there are no classes tomorrow. The night is going to be crazy.

Then you get the day-ruining notification: you lost the lottery. You stare at your phone in despair. Your homies laugh at your misfortune. You are about to miss the game of the season. You drop to your knees, screaming in agony, praying to anybody who will listen that there is some other way to get a ticket.

Sadly, nobody has an available ticket. All hope is lost. If only there was a way you could have guaranteed a win to the game of your choice that does not require you being a practitioner of black magic.

Let’s say that you really want to go to the next home game, and you have a few points to spare on the tickets app. What if you could dump some points into the lottery to guarantee that you won?

We students can gain points in the Villanova Student Tickets App by going to one of our athletic teams’ games/matches and getting our QR code scanned upon entry. 

When we enter the lotteries for the men’s basketball games, the more points we have, the higher the likelihood it is that we will win tickets to that game. However, no matter how high your point total goes, your odds of winning can never be 100%, so it is likely that you will miss out on a couple of good games.

There are many of us who love to attend any game that we can make it to, especially men’s basketball. So missing out on a game sucks, especially if we know it is going to be a close game, if we are playing a good team or a historic rival.

What if we could spend some points to guarantee that we make it to that game?

The price would have to be high enough so that those with high totals can’t abuse the system to be able to buy their way into every game, but it should also be low enough so people who haven’t been able to go to many games could be able to make it to the one or two games a season that they really want.

This could look something like another box next to the “Enter” button in the app, which could be titled something similar to “Guaranteed Admittance (-x points).”

Or, if Villanova Athletics really wants to keep the points as a ranking system and not necessarily as a currency, what if every student was entitled to one or two of these guaranteed wins every season? That way, even if you have not gone to a single other athletic event this year, you could still make it to a couple of the most hyped up events on campus or get into that one game with all your friends.

I think we are pretty limited as to how we spend our points. The only way we can really lose or “spend” them is if we get a ticket, then don’t show up, which makes our total points more of a rank. If Villanova Athletics really wants them to be “points,” we should be able to spend them on something.

What if you won tickets to a certain game, but instead of having to stand in one of the student sections, you could fork over some of your points to get one of the actual seats? Or maybe you could pay a nominal fee of points with every lottery win to get early admittance, so you could be certain that you would get a good spot in the student sections.

The fact that Villanova students can attend almost any athletic event at the school free of charge is a beautiful thing, especially when men’s basketball is as good and popular as it is.

The lottery system is good in that it allows all of us a (kind-of) fair chance to attend any of the games in the Finneran Pavilion or Wells Fargo Center, but it could use some improvement with respect to the student’s ability to choose.

I personally believe that attending Villanova men’s basketball games have been some of my favorite moments on campus, and it would be amazing to be able to see more people experience them.