- Joined
- Dec 22, 2011
- Messages
- 43,163
OC , I was told by Fl Sports parking was limited and they did not sell to either Canes or Gates. Not sure that is correct but parking was all gone in March when they gave me my one and only parking pass at Gate 10. I just got lucky knowing someone. As for downtown, when I checked all garages well full even the ones for Dr Phillips Center months ago. I still believe this is going to be a cluster F
Florida Citrus Sports is lying about not "selling" parking, maybe they are not selling to the general public, but they sold most of the parking, in bulk, to the Gaytors. Think about this. The stadium holds 60K, they let UM and UF sell 50K and held 10K for Florida Citrus Sports members. If Florida Citrus Sports tries to argue that all of their parking has been given to the 10,000 ticketholders from Florida Citrus Sports, that is a lie.
I am passing along what I was told from someone with knowledge within the UMAA, which is that most of the Florida Citrus Sports people are Gaytors, and the Gaytors AD requested (and got) most of the available parking, while Blake James did not request any. In addition, there is a new person who is the professional VP of the Alumni Association (i.e., the person who has a full-time job working at UM, not the actual volunteer President who is a UM alum), and the new VP is from Arizona State and doesn't have any awareness of how big this game is, so no pre-game tailgate was planned until the last minute, when Florida Citrus Sports caved and let us have Tinker Field.
Since we got the Tinker Field tailgate set up, there was LIMITED parking made available to UM ticketholders, but you had to be Silver Canes level (I think they call it Category 5 now) to get the parking. One of my friends just got a parking pass last week...through UM...in one of the stadium lots.
I've been trying to tell people from the beginning that Blake James is a disaster, especially because his whole background is ticket sales. I heard about the possible date change from a friend on Florida Citrus Sports before tickets went on sale, and I contacted a couple of the moderators here to try to get confirmation before the dates of the ticket sale. Then Blake completely screwed up the ticket sale, with multiple incorrect e-mails, no limits on how many times Golden Canes could purchase additional ticket blocks, and a random re-offering of tickets after certain ticket sales were cancelled. Now I found out that Blake didn't negotiate for any parking spaces, and only belatedly secured Tinker Field for a tailgate.
Finally, as for the overall parking situation, I'm not sure if it is as bad as you think. Yes, the Backstreet Boys concert was announced in November of last year, but everyone didn't immediately purchase parking. In 2017, there was a Jimmy Buffet concert at Amway on the same day that Orlando City Soccer was playing, and everyone managed to find parking.
Several people on this board have been able to buy parking in GEICO, several have purchased Orange Lot (right next to Orlando City Soccer Stadium) and several have purchased in Lot B and surrounding lots (across the street from the Orange Lot). And for the garages near Dr. Phillips, such as City Commons and SunTrust, I do not believe they do pre-sales (maybe City Commons has changed, but SunTrust is not, I just parked there last week for an event).
And I just checked the City of Orlando lots - 55 West has availability (parking garage on Church Street), Central Boulevard Garage has availability, Amelia Street Garage has availability (Bob Carr/old Orlando Arena area to the west of I-4), and the Jefferson Street Parking Garage has availability, in addition to the Orange Lot.
It's still going to be a clusterfvck, but you can thank Blake James for that. The UM Athletic Department and UMAA have completely ignored parking and done nothing to provide any of us with assistance or information. UM could have easily purchased parking in certain parking lots and then resold it to us, but they wanted nothing to do with this part of the process.