Despite the fact students picked up about one-third of tickets made available Wednesday for the Iowa State football game, the athletic department is considering increasing the amount of tickets available to 6,500.

Wednesday was the first day students were allowed to pick up tickets before the Sept. 27 game. About 2,000 tickets were picked up by 4 p.m., but Athletic Director Cary Groth said the department is working hard to accommodate students and has saved an extra 500 tickets for students, if they’re needed.

However, if history is any indication, 6,000 tickets for students will be plenty. The crowd for the Aug. 28 game versus Maryland was the largest in NIU history, and that game drew slightly more than 5,900 students, Groth said.

Over the last few years, student attendance at home games has averaged around 4,000, but Groth said they’re hoping for a larger crowd next weekend. To accommodate the expected crowd, the ticket office only sold 2,000 general-admission tickets for the east side of the stadium.

Roughly 600 seats on the east side also have been reserved for the band. That brings the total of reserved seats to 9,100. While the east side can hold 10,000 fans, the athletic department routinely sells fewer tickets for safety reasons because it’s a general-admission area, Groth said.

This is the first time students had to pick up tickets prior to a football game. The tickets didn’t go as fast as was thought, Groth said. Usually during pick-ups of this nature, 70 to 75 percent of the tickets will go on the first day, she said.

Slightly more than 33 percent of the available tickets were picked up Wednesday, but athletic ticket manager Mike Rockovich said he expects that number to jump.

“As people talk to their friends and see who got tickets, more will come out,” Rockovich said.

The systems wasn’t without its problems either.

At around 8:30 a.m., when tickets were first available for pick-up, the line was about 600 to 800 people deep, Rockovich said.

At the same time, the NIU OneCard system, which is used to swipe IDs, also was encountering problems. For the first few hours, the ticket office had to manually cross off names of people who picked up tickets on a list all fee-paying NIU students.

Some students were forced to wait in line for about a half-hour, but roughly 1,000 students were manually processed, Rockovich said.

“About 99.9 percent of them were OK with it,” Rockovich said.