Appalachian State University’s Student Government Association (SGA) will open a new online database next week to control the student tailgate lottery for football game days.

The lottery database, which was created and designed by two computer information science (CIS) students last year, is a completely automated system that will utilize student e-mail accounts.

“SGA has always used whatever method they could come up with, and there wasn’t really a system for the lottery,” SGA President P.A. Rowe said. “But now, the new system we have does it all and keeps it all in house. It will help us keep track of everything, such as who won which week or who has picked up their passes.”

In previous years, SGA would take the list of students who were registered for the lottery and put them into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. An SGA member would then go through the list and randomly select students.

“Before there was an issue of integrity for the SGA lottery system, but now it’s a totally automated system,” said Matt Lyons, who designed the new lottery system with fellow CIS major Eric Herman for a class in the spring.

Lyons and Herman, who both graduated with degrees in CIS in May, designed the program to be less complicated for both students and SGA.

Now, all students entering the lottery will submit their e-mail to the system’s website, and once they are verified, their names go into the database.

After lottery registration is completed for the week and the database is set, an SGA officer will only be required to enter how many spaces are available around campus.

“Say SGA has 300 spaces, all the SGA officer has to do is enter 300 spaces into the system and it automatically picks 300 winners,” Lyons said.

Lottery winners will now be e-mailed, where they can access a link and choose their own spot using an interactive browser.

The database system also allows SGA officials to keep better track of lottery winners, who has picked up their passes or students who have trashed their parking spot.

“This is going to give us better ability to track students throughout the year, because one thing that’s come up a lot is the trash left behind on game days,” Rowe said. “We’re going to have to do a better job of noting the places that are in bad shape, and blocking those people for the year. And this computer system will allow us to do that.”

Though the system is completely automated, Lyons said students have a better chance of winning this year.

“The way we wrote the code, if you win the first week, you have a smaller percentage to win the second week, but you can still win,” Lyons said. “Everyone just has a better shot of winning now.”

Though students will not be able to register until next week, they can access the new lottery database at sga.appstate.edu.

Story: NASH DUNN, News Editor