Take me out to the Durham Bulls game: Use Duke PERQS discount
Salvatore Mungal (far right), a bioinformatics analyst at the Duke Cancer Center, enjoys a Durham Bulls game with family.
-- By Marsha A. Green
May 01, 2010
The first time Salvatore Mungal saw a baseball game, he thought it odd that players used gloves.
“I grew up in the West Indies playing cricket, where you don’t use gloves,” he said. In college in New York, fast balls pitched by friends turned his bare hands red, so he decided to pick up a glove. Friends may have taught him that lesson, but his wife, Audrey, turned him into a baseball fan. “She’s a Mets fan,” he said. “We watched a lot of games together.”
Mungal, a bioinformatics analyst at the Duke Cancer Center, often purchases Durham Bulls baseball tickets for family gatherings through PERQS, Duke’s employee discount program.
“Whenever someone visits we make a point of getting a big troop of people together,” he said. “We can have up to a dozen people go, so it really helps to get a discount.”
The Durham Bulls, whose season runs through September, offers Duke faculty and staff discount tickets to select games through PERQS. The discount varies game to game, from savings on tickets to game packages that include a ticket plus Bulls memorabilia or coupons for food and drinks from stadium vendors.
The discounts are generally only advertised through the PERQS e-mail list, which employees can subscribe to from hr.duke.edu/discounts. Over 175 businesses or vendors offer discounts to Duke employees, and 13,400 faculty and staff are on the PERQS e-mail list to learn about special offers.
Kim Bowman, space coordinator for the Duke Clinical Research Institute, has used the discount tickets to take her family to Bulls games since her 6-year-old son, Grant, was a toddler. “Grant has become a big fan,” she said. “He loves to watch Wool E. Bull ride around the field on the go cart, and cheers wildly when the big bull blows smoke to celebrate a home run.”
For Mungal, fan interaction is what makes a Bulls game special.
“If you go see the Mets in New York, you are so far from the field you feel like a nobody,” he said. “In Durham, it’s different. Taking the family out, eating hot dogs, sitting close to the field, having a few laughs. You really feel part of the game. You can’t beat that experience.”
Be the first to know
Learn about special PERQS discounts, including Durham Bulls tickets, by signing up for the PERQS e-mail listserve at hr.duke.edu/discounts.
The e-mail includes offers that may not be listed on the PERQS website.