Jan. 27--Pat Fitzgerald wants YOU to renew your Northwestern football season tickets.
And that's not you in the generic sense.
Coming off back-to-back 5-7 seasons, the Northwestern coach recorded more than 100 personalized video messages that were emailed to season-ticket holders and appear on NUsports.com. If your name is Patrick, you'll appreciate this one.
Spokesman Paul Kennedy said it reflects an effort to remind season-ticket holders how much they are appreciated. Every season-ticket holder account (nearly 10,000) will receive a personalized video, phone call or hand-written note from a coach.
"We wanted to give everyone a personal bit of contact and we asked ourselves: 'How can we do things differently?'" Kennedy said. "What's funny is that people who saw them asked: 'How was that edited or put together?' They weren't."
Fitzgerald spent nearly five hours doing all the videos.
Season tickets go on sale Wednesday and renewals go out next week.
By changing the number in the URL, you can access a different greeting. They range from about 26-34 seconds and go like this: "Hi, YOUR NAME, this is Pat Fitzgerald, your head football coach here at Northwestern. This upcoming week, we'll add a terrific group of young men to our football family with our recruiting class. Speaking of family, thank you for being a season-ticket holder. YOUR NAME, we need you now to step up again and renew those season tickets to give us the best home-field advantage in Big Ten football. I know you're gonna be out there cheering us on loud and wearing your purple all season long. NAME, let's go beat Stanford. Go Cats!"
In another message, Fitzgerald says: "I really want to challenge you to come out to support the Wildcats as we move forward to getting back to a championship level ... you're part of the solution. We need you to continue to be a season ticket-holder and find a friend or two -- or 20! -- to be season-ticket holders, too."
NU alum and season-ticket holder Kevin F. Sherry said he appreciated the gesture.
"It's nice to see that I'm not just another purple paycheck to NU," Sherry said via email. "This project took a lot of time and effort to pull together, and as a PR professional I think it's brilliant. I was going to renew my season tickets anyway, but it's little things like this that make me feel like we fans are a respected part of the NU football family as well."
Northwestern drew an average of 38,613 fans last year to Ryan Field, which seats 47,330.
