Yellow Jacket Fans,
It’s an exciting time on The Flats!
I’d like to begin by thanking you for your incredible support of Georgia Tech athletics throughout this year. Earlier this week, we announced that we have sold out 43 events this year, putting us well on our way to reaching our goal of 50 sellouts in 2025-26.
When I arrived last July, one of the top priorities was to enhance the fan experience here at Georgia Tech. Our staff embraced the challenge with a lot of new and creative ways to engage our fan base but, at the end of the day, we thank YOU for your incredible support. It’s not just about the record attendance, but even more importantly, it’s about the energy and atmosphere that you’ve brought to our venues. We have quickly built some of the best homefield advantages in all of college sports – particularly at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field and Mac Nease Baseball Park at Russ Chandler Stadium – where our football and baseball teams are a combined 27-3 this year.
In addition, as you’ve heard me say many times, never in the history of college athletics has success been so closely tied to revenue. Your support at the box office helps us provide our teams with the resources needed to compete for championships. So, on behalf of our student-athletes, coaches and staff, I once again THANK YOU for your support and encourage you to keep coming out to enjoy the energy on The Flats. Tickets are going fast for all of our remaining baseball home games, including near sellouts for all three games of next weekend’s home series versus Wake Forest (Friday-Sunday, April 24-26), and for both shows of Bruno Mars: The Romantic Tour at Bobby Dodd Stadium (Saturday-Sunday, April 25-26).
But, in addition to this year’s remaining events, I encourage you to purchase your season tickets for our upcoming football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and volleyball seasons, which are all on sale now. As sellouts become the norm on The Flats, the only way to guarantee your seats is to purchase season tickets. Additionally, the guaranteed revenue from season tickets allows us to be more strategic in how we invest our resources in not only our teams, but back into making the fan experience at our venues even more engaging and electric.
Purchase your tickets today by clicking HERE.
Additionally, your philanthropic support and contributions through the Full Steam Ahead initiative and the Alexander-Tharpe Fund are also critical to the continued success of our athletics department. Like I’ve shared our success in attendance and ticket sales, I’m looking forward to sharing the success that we’ve had this year – and will continue to have – in our fundraising efforts.
WHITE & GOLD GAME
Three of our aforementioned sold-out events are in conjunction with this Saturday’s White & Gold Spring Game.
As we began planning this year’s White & Gold Game, our primary goal was to better engage fans. With that in mind, we introduced three new events – a Legends Brunch, presented by The Tech Way, that features Bill Curry, Randy Rhino, Morgan Burnett, Joshua Nesbitt and will be hosted by Roddy Jones; a Kids Clinic, presented by Georgia Power; and an exclusive season ticket members event. All three are completely sold out.
We’re also looking forward to a great atmosphere when toe meets leather on Hyundai Field at 1 p.m. In addition to the action on the field, be on the lookout to some tweaks to the in-stadium fan experience, as we begin to roll out 100 improvements to the gameday experience and atmosphere that will be implemented at Bobby Dodd Stadium for the 2026 season.
We’re looking forward to a great crowd for Saturday’s game, which is the first opportunity to see this exciting team in action ahead of the highly anticipated 2026 season. There’s been a great energy at practice throughout the spring, as head coach Brent Key molds a solid base of returners from last season’s top-25 team with an exciting group of newcomers, including transfers Alberto Mendoza and Justice Haynes and new coordinators George Godsey and Jason Semore. I think you’ll be excited by the product you see on the field on Saturday and energized for kickoff against Colorado on Sept. 3!
BASEBALL
One of the biggest stories, not just here in Atlanta but across college sports, is your Yellow Jacket baseball team, which is 31-5 overall, 15-3 in ACC play, ranked No. 2 nationally and winners of 13-straight games headed into another pivotal ACC series this weekend at No. 3 North Carolina.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about their current 13-game winning streak is that seven of the wins have come against top-15 opponents, including last weekend’s dominant three-game sweep of No. 5 Florida State at Mac Nease Baseball Park at Russ Chandler Stadium.
After the three-game series at UNC, the Jackets return home for a big one – Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate versus No. 5 Georgia, Tuesday night at Truist Park.
Please be sure to join us for a pregame tailgate event at Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux in the Battery, just steps from Truist Park, beginning at 5 p.m. Coach Key and Justice Haynes will be on hand, as will 680 The Fan’s Chuck and Chernoff, who will have an exclusive interview with Coach Key that will air live on their social platforms. Admission is completely free, so be sure to stop by Walk-On’s to say hello and get energized with Tech fans before heading into the park.
As a reminder, this is the 23rd-annual Spring Classic game, with all ticket proceeds benefitting Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. So not only will you be supporting the Yellow Jackets in one of college baseball’s biggest rivalries and games of the year, but you’ll also be supporting a great cause. Let’s break the Spring Classic attendance record of 28,836 (set in 2004 at Turner Field), which remains the third-biggest crowd in NCAA baseball regular-season history! Get your tickets HERE.
WHITE & GOLD GAME, SPRING CLASSIC TELEVISION
I’ve received some questions about why Saturday’s White & Gold Game and Tuesday’s Spring Classic aren’t being televised.
For the White & Gold Game, our partners at ESPN and the ACC Network have shifted away from producing television broadcasts for spring games and invested in all-access shows that give fans a behind-the-scenes look at programs across the league and will air late this spring and throughout the summer. Our all-access show is being produced by Georgia Tech football letterwinner and multi-time Emmy winner Harris Mendheim, one of the world’s most acclaimed producers of sports documentaries and features. It’s going to be outstanding, and we can’t wait for you to see it on ESPN platforms soon.
For the Spring Classic, it simply wasn’t one of the games that our partners at ESPN chose for its college baseball schedule this spring. It being at Truist Park instead of on campus, where each school already has an infrastructure in place to deliver productions to ESPN, played a large role.
For games that aren’t a part of ESPN’s production schedules, home schools are responsible for the cost of producing live streams. Those costs would have been well into the tens of thousands of dollars for each game and, in this era of college athletics, we feel that those resources can be better invested in other areas of our operations, including revenue sharing with student-athletes. Therefore, we chose this year to not pursue streaming these particular events.
However, we are always looking to expand and improve our engagement with fans, and will therefore continue to explore all avenues and opportunities to televise these events in the future.
IN MEMORIAM
Since the last time I wrote you, two great Yellow Jackets have passed away.
Georgia Tech football letterwinner and longtime supporter Dr. Allen Ecker passed away on March 14. Allen played football at Georgia Tech under Bobby Dodd from 1954-56, helping lead the Yellow Jackets to wins in the Cotton Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Gator Bowl, as well as three-straight top-15 finishes. Individually, he was a first-team all-SEC selection, first-team all-American and Academic All-American as a senior.
He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech, and a PhD in electrical engineering from Ohio State. A captain in the U.S. Air Force, he went on to be a leader in the telecommunications industry, culminating in inductions in the National Cable & Telecommunications Association Hall of Fame, the Technology Hall of Fame of Georgia and the IEEE Fellows Hall of Fame, as well as earning the Joseph Mayo Petit Distinguished Service Award and Lifetime Achievement Award for Innovation from Atlanta Telecom Professionals.
A 1978 Georgia Tech Sports Hall of Fame inductee, Allen and his wife, Sandra, were tennis lovers who endowed a men’s and women’s tennis scholarship at Georgia Tech and have a court named in their honor at the home of Tech tennis, the Byers Tennis Complex. They also provided scholarships for Georgia Tech biomedical engineering students and were supporters of the Institute’s EXCEL program. He was proceeded in death by his wife of 62 years, Sandra, and a son, Stephen. He is survived by daughter, Holli, son, Mike, four grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Charles Sewell passed away on March 23 at age 93. A lifelong Georgia Tech fan, Charles co-founded and served as president of Sewell Plastics, where he produced the first 2-liter beverage container for The Coca-Cola Company, and founded CKS Packaging, which is the eighth-largest plastic blow-molding company in North America.
In his obituary, it states that “Charles loved four things above all: God, his family, CKS Packaging and Georgia Tech football.” His and his family’s support and friendship have been invaluable to the upward trajectory of Tech football. Charles was a legendary figure in business and in the community, and he will be greatly missed. Our deepest condolences go out to his wife of 46 years, Catherine, his five children, Kenny, John, Drew, Dedra and Samantha, his 15 grandchildren, 20 great grandchildren, four great-great grandchildren, three step-grandchildren and four step-great-great grandchildren.
Please join us in keeping these great Tech Men and their families and loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.
ACC & NCAA SWIMMING AND DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS
Over the last two months, through the incredible work of our staff, Georgia Tech hosted both the ACC and NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships at McAuley Aquatic Center. Both meets presented amazing opportunities to highlight our campus, the Institute and the city of Atlanta to passionate fans from across the nation.
Hosting both meets also allowed our very own Max Fowler to showcase himself as one of the nation’s premier divers right here on The Flats. In the ACC Championships, Max became the first male diver in conference history to ever appear in the finals on all three boards – 1-meter, 3-meter (which he won for the second-straight year) and platform – en route to being named the ACC Diver of the Year. During NCAAs, he earned first-team all-America honors in the 1-meter and second-team in the 3-meter and is now a four-time all-American (with a season still remaining!).
Congratulations to Max on his outstanding accomplishments right here on The Flats!
Go Jackets!
Sting ‘Em,
Ryan Alpert
Vice President/Director of Athletics
Georgia Tech
