The plans of an Illinois basketball student support group to attend Saturday's Iowa-Illinois basketball game at Carver-Hawkeye Arena have been "krushed" by Iowa athletics department officials.
Members of the Orange Krush, a long-standing student organization that supports Fighting Illini basketball and raises money for charitable causes, were informed by Iowa on Wednesday that the 200 tickets the group had purchased for the 1:30 p.m. border battle had been invalidated.
In a statement released on the Iowa basketball program's Twitter account on Wednesday night, Iowa officials indicated that the tickets were invalidated when the athletics department became aware that a discounted group ticket order for the game had not actually been purchased by the organization that the purchaser indicated was buying the tickets.
The statement said the order was originally made on behalf of an Illinois chapter of the Boys and Girls Club.
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"In following up with that organization, it became clear this was not factual. When contacting the individual who made the original ticket order, they admitted to falsely ordering tickets under the non-profit organization," Iowa officials said.
Iowa athletics then refunded the original ticket order to the individual who ordered the tickets and has donated the 200 tickets to the Boys and Girls Club of Cedar Rapids.
"We look forward to welcoming these kids to a sold-out Carver-Hawkeye Arena this Saturday," the statement concluded.
The situation became public after leadership of the Orange Krush issued a statement of their own earlier Wednesday evening announcing the cancellation of the trip.
The group which has been in existence for more than a quarter of a century has for the past two decades made trips to one Fighting Illini road game per season.
Individuals who are selected to make the trip are those who raise the most funds over the course of a year for the group's charitable endeavors.
Often, the group will show up at the arena they are visiting in non-descript apparel or in the colors of the home team, only to peel it off in favor of their traditional orange garb just before tipoff.
The Orange Krush, which has shown up at games at places like Minnesota and Penn State over the years, has made two previous trips to Iowa. The group attended Iowa-Illinois games at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in 2010 and 2015, but that won't happen this weekend.
Leaders said the late notification by Iowa will come at cost, precluding the group from being able to opt to attend an Illinois game at another venue later this season.
"Because the University of Iowa waited to make this decision until today, February 1st, it is now too close to the scheduled date of the trip to cancel the charter buses that had been arranged and receive a full refund," the group said in its statement, saying the organization will lose nearly $6,000 from its $30,000 budget.
"Any organization cannot realistically withstand losing one-fifth of its yearly budget and we are no different. This means that financially we cannot afford to pivot to another destination even if there were sufficiently available tickets."
It went to say that the Orange Krush road trip will be delayed until the 2023-24 season "assuming the chosen destination is on a campus with a less fearful athletic department than the one representing the University of Iowa."
