Tickets for the University of Kentucky’s annual Blue-White Game will go on sale Friday morning, the first opportunity outside of Big Blue Madness for fans to get an on-court look at the new Wildcats.
This year’s edition — scheduled for Oct. 18 — will be drastically different from past events.
Instead of a standard intrasquad scrimmage, the “ Blue/White Preseason Event ” — as it has been dubbed by organizers — will feature practice sessions for both the men’s and women’s basketball teams, which will be entering their first seasons under new head coaches Mark Pope and Kenny Brooks , respectively.
After the men’s team played its past two preseason scrimmages on the road — trips to Pikeville in 2022 and Northern Kentucky’s campus in 2023, with charity aspects tied to both events — this edition will be played in the renovated Memorial Coliseum, home to the women’s team.
The biggest change of all: the proceeds from the Blue/White Preseason Event will go directly to Club Blue , the UK Athletics-affiliated NIL group. Club Blue has posted ticket packages for the event, and the non-member prices range from $125 on the low end to $1,550 for the “courtside” experience, with several options in between. Club Blue members will receive a 20% discount.
For comparison, tickets for the men’s Blue-White Game at NKU last year ranged from $10 to $25.
This is a new era of college basketball, however, and organizers are clearly hoping that fans will help cover more of the costs for building and maintaining the Wildcats’ rosters moving forward.
Pope and the players on the 2024-25 team participated in a first-of-its-kind Club Blue event in June that featured autograph sessions and meet-and-greet opportunities with fans that had donated to the NIL cause in advance.
There, Pope stressed the importance of fan participation in the NIL space.
“Club Blue is at the heart of so much of what we’re doing,” he said. “And we have incredible people at Club Blue that are paving a way for us to continue to be incredibly competitive in this space. And it actually is a beautiful part of what college athletics is now. In the sense that all of us can be a part of this in a very real sense. And all of us need to be a part of this in a very real sense. And there’s nobody that can do that better than Kentucky. There’s just no fan base like ours that is devoted and willing and intentional enough to do what we can do here.”
This will be the first time since 2006 that the men’s Blue-White scrimmage has taken place in Memorial Coliseum.
Tickets for the Blue/White Preseason Event will go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, and fans can sign up on the Club Blue website to be notified when those sales are live.
The event will feature Pope and Brooks offering in-game insights, and there will be pregame, in-game and postgame “fan experience” opportunities. The highest-priced packages include a tour of the new Memorial Coliseum and the Joe Craft practice facility.
The Blue-White event will take place exactly one week after Big Blue Madness , which is set for Oct. 11 in Rupp Arena. Ticket information for Madness has not yet been announced.
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