While her Orlando office literally is shouting distance from Disney World and its designation as "the place where dreams come true," Brooke Smoley is taking a bit of a different tact.
Smoley, in her fourth year as UCF's associate athletics director for analytics and ticket sales, generally is in the business of saying "yes" when Knights' fans are looking for tickets.
But already this fall, Smoley has found herself having to say "no" – and as painful as that might seem in her profession, she absolutely loves it.
It's simply the latest chapter in her wild and crazy three and a half years at UCF – and it looks like there's more to come.
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When Smoley (a Florida State graduate from Miami, Florida) was hired at UCF in April 2016, the Knights were coming off an 0-12 football season in 2015. Six home football games that previous fall drew an average of 30,064 fans (about two-thirds of the capacity at Spectrum Stadium).
"When I got here we did not really have an outbound sales team," says Smoley. "Our ticket operation had been more focused on serving the accounts."
So Smoley changed the course.
"We wanted to immediately develop and implement a strategy to find new season-ticket holders through our database--growing it and engaging with our alumni who maybe had come to a game once or twice a few years ago but hadn't been back for a while.
"I knew we were coming off this 0-12 season, so we pushed hard with a different narrative--we were selling hope.
"You also had a lot of fans that did not want to come back because they were upset (at 0-12). Finding the fans that were passionate about the team was what we were charged with.
"We spent a lot of time building that database of people we thought would become season-ticket holders. And we did really well making a lot of outbound sales calls trying to engage with new people. We sold a decent amount that year—I was actually impressed with what we were able to do coming off that previous season.
"Our selling point that first year was all about the hope of what this team and what the program could be."
The 2015 season had brought the addition of premium seating via the Carl Black and Gold Cabana. A year later came a new video board. Another season after that came the field cabanas.
Meanwhile, the 2016 season produced a 6-7 record and a bowl invitation. A year after that the Knights finished 13-0, defeating seventh-ranked Auburn in the Peach Bowl, one of the New Year's Six contests.
That sort of on-field success dovetailed perfectly with UCF's plan to change the pricing structure for 2017 (with that the Knights promised no additional price increases through 2019) and set a goal of selling 10,000 new season tickets a year later.
Smoley says even before that 2017 season ended, her sales staff got off to a head start—with each member of the sales staff charged with making at least 100 calls a day.
And then the Peach Bowl changed everything.
Says Smoley, "I remember standing on the field after the Peach Bowl and my phone was going crazy. All the emails on interest in season tickets were funneled through one address, and I had about 400 of them immediately after that game. It was amazing."
The 10,400 new season tickets sold for the 2018 season definitely was a record for UCF.
"And it may have been one of the best years in history by anyone in college football," says Smoley, who also has worked in ticketing at the University of Houston and for the Miami Dolphins.
"The sales staff made 110,342 outbound calls. The fans were so engaged with us. They helped us find new season-ticket holders, whether it was neighbors or other people they knew. They really rallied around what we wanted to do.
"We were very transparent on Twitter with our goal. And our fan base is so passionate and all those people wanted to help us meet those goals. They were great about that.
"It was a huge year. (Athletics director) Danny (White) picked that number, and we built a strategy around getting to that figure. That was the big focus.
"There was an amazing amount of excitement that translated into those huge numbers. People were just hyped up with what the football team was doing. Everybody just rallied around the program."
Then, coming off a 12-1 campaign in Josh Heupel's first season in 2018, the Knights took the next step.
"We had a decent amount of season tickets to sell to get to that point where we had sold out of those and so that was the outbound focus—to get that done by the end of the summer," says Smoley.
"And Knight Nation stepped up with referrals, telling us that people they worked with were interested. We have options for everybody, starting with $99 season tickets, so there was almost no excuse not to come. Families could come with the family plan and it was incredible to think we could sell out the stadium on that basis."
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Once football season tickets were gone by late summer in 2019, Smoley's focus changed again.
It began with constant warnings to staff members that when they were looking for two tickets to a game at the last minute, those tickets weren't going to be there. That was new for UCF.
"What's interesting now," says Smoley, "is that the priority has turned to selling through what remains (in returns) of the visiting team allotment. We hold 3,000 seats for the visiting team--and the single-game ticket is a different kind of sale. Now we're talking to companies that may want to bring a group of people to a game. We are making sure the pricing strategy works because these are all potential future season-ticket holders. So the day-to-day approach has changed--our pitch has changed.
"We're obviously very focused on building the waiting list for season tickets--making sure that when people call that we get them on that list.
"The other part is that the customer service aspect has changed because now we have more time to develop relationships with our season-ticket holders, focusing on their experiences. We have the ability to help them at games because we're no longer focused as much on selling tickets at the games because of the sellouts.
"We want to make sure that everybody that's coming to our games keeps coming to our games. If they are here in 2019, we want them back in 2020.
"We're less focused on going out and finding new business and more focused on taking care of the people who are here."
And with much of the heavy lifting already done for football, it allowed Smoley and her staff to move on to men's basketball sooner--and that resulted in an all-time UCF high in new season tickets sold in that sport.
The football season-ticket sellout combined with massive student interest has prompted White and his staff, for the first time, to talk seriously about the potential to expand the stadium.
"Fans are really excited about it and our staff is, too," says Smoley. "Give them another 10,000 tickets to sell and they're going to be all about it.
"Everybody I talk to is excited because this is a monumental moment for the program. There are lots of programs that would like to downsize their stadium because their number is too big--and here we're having the conversation to expand. That's very different. The sales staff is all jazzed up about it – they wish it could happen next year. If we had those seats tomorrow we could definitely sell them."
And Smoley celebrates the youthful dynamic of UCF's fan base—starting with selling young alumni ticket packages to graduates (those sold out this year in June).
"This is definitely the youngest fan base I've dealt with – and it's great because they embrace technology and that makes it so much easier," she says. "The average age of our season-ticket holders is so young--they absolutely enjoy the technology advances we've made and can offer.
"We've moved some of the self-scanners over from student gates and it makes it so much easier for fans to enter the stadium quickly. They're asking for more things like that—and I'm not sure if that's as common at other schools."
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Smoley remembers what it was like in the good old days—actually just a few seasons back.
"When I first started, people could walk up to the ticket office on game day and an hour before kickoff be able to buy a 50-yard line ticket," she says.
"Those days are gone.
"It's amazing to see how that has changed in these three and a half years."
Now, that phone call at 4 p.m. on a Friday before a Knights' home game may encounter a "no vacancy" sign.
"I love the fact that we can say 'no,'" Smoley adds.
"People still call us about season tickets even though we were very public about announcing those were all sold for 2019. I love the fact we have to say, 'I'm sorry, we don't have any season tickets left, and I can't get you tickets for Stanford or USF . . . but we might be able to find you tickets for another home game.'
"I love being in that position because when I started here that's not where we were.
"I like telling people, 'Sorry, I can't help you with that'--because it's a great place for our program to be."
And now Smoley and her staff are ready for the next challenge in making Knight fans' dreams come true.
A New UCF Twist on 'Making Dreams Come True'
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