Cal sold football tickets without seats

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BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 4 (UPI) -- The newly renovated Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., had fewer seats than sold tickets at Saturday's Cal-Nevada football game, Cal officials admitted.

University of California athletic director Sandy Barbour acknowledged the problem, apologized and said the issue would be corrected by the game next Saturday against Southern Utah, the Oakland Tribune reported Tuesday.

Three sections of the stadium were rebuilt with bench seats in a $321 million renovation and seismic retrofit, and the school did not have the opportunity to hold a test event to ensure each ticket sold had a corresponding seat, the newspaper said.

It is standard practice in new stadiums to estimate how many seats will fit in each row, said Ashwin Puri, Cal's associate director for sales marketing and service, and at Saturday's game an announced crowd of 63,168 squeezed into a facility with a capacity for 63,000.

"We are proactively reaching out to every affected ticket holder to solve this. We want to make sure every one of our fans is happy," Puri said.