The most current attendance and ticketing information is not to great for Hokie Nation. It seems that someone in Richmond has currently decided that no more than 1,000 people can be present in a 65,000 seat stadium, at least for the first game of the season. That means an empty Lane Stadium, with only the families of the teams and the support staff. We don’t even know if we are going to get any sort of credentials to cover the games, at all. We’ll be checking on that this week.

The semi official word is: We don’t completely know yet.

That’s some serious hardship, folks. The hotels, restaurants, bars, and kitsch stores around the New River Valley depend heavily on six to seven Game Day events a fall season. It’s not just the ticket and Hokie Club revenue from the season ticket sales. It’s not just the in stadium concessions which are often manned by volunteers donating to various charitable causes around the area. It’s the functional economy of Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Radford, and the hospitality industry for more than 100 miles north and south on I-81.

Tech has launched a program to talk Hokie Nation into deferring their season ticket and donation refunds for some amount of brownie point credit; Keep Jumping. This is the full page of various pieces of information and FAQs current as of August 19th.We’ll see how that eventually shakes out, but there are lots of “secondary” ticket sale businesses that aren’t going to graciously eat the costs for a tax write off and some points on their next year’s Hokie Club membership.

We’ll keep you as up to date as we can, but the information flow and official government policies that control all of this happen on their time, not ours.

Keep up the good thoughts, and as always,

GO HOKIES!!!!