- I attended my first Super Bowl as a reporter this year.
- It was a successful trip, but there are things I will do differently next time.
Super Bowl LVII will forever be my first.
As an Eagles fan, the game didn't go my way, but it was a great trip for me as a reporter. I blogged a lot!
I also learned a lot of lessons about how to better prepare myself for the Super Bowl, which I will hopefully be covering again in the future. We all make rookie mistakes, but the goal is to learn from them.
I will spend more time learning about the host city ahead of my next Super Bowl.
Phoenix is a cool city, but there is quite a bit of sprawl that I was not wholly prepared to traverse. During Super Bowl week, plenty of events took place in downtown Phoenix, but the game itself was at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, roughly 30 minutes away.
Meanwhile, the Waste Management Phoenix Open, which I also attended for a day, took place at TPC Scottsdale, another half-hour drive out of town. The team hotels were quite a stretch away from downtown as well.
Shuttles were available for many of the places that I needed to get to, but sometimes I had to rely on Uber and Lyft to get me around town, and unsurprisingly, surge prices added up quickly given how many people were in the area between the Super Bowl and WMPO.
Renting a car still would have been a bad option as parking was difficult all around town, and public transit in Phoenix left much to be desired, so ride shares were still the right move, but had I known the amount of rides I would be taking ahead of my trip, I would have been in a better position for success.
Had I been better aware of the geography of Phoenix and the amount of driving necessary, I might have signed up for a premium membership with Uber or Lyft ahead of the trip, especially if there was a free trial month available.
Additionally, I spent the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl planning a lot around work — What would I be writing? What team would I try to cover what day? What day would best fit to sneak out to the golf tournament?
But I didn't spend nearly enough time preparing for some of the simpler aspects of the trip, like where I would eat dinner. Just an hour of googling ahead of my flight out could have given me a few destinations that I could know I wanted to eat at.
Instead, I found myself wholly exhausted at the end of day with no plan on how to eat food, and dragging myself to whatever dinner plate I could find. It's a mistake that I never make when traveling for leisure — eating is the best part of traveling in a lot of cases — but I was in work mode heading into the trip, and failed to account for the fact that my body would still need nourishment. Dumb move by me!
Timing was an issue, and one that can be beaten if better prepared.
I am treating myself kindly as it was my first time taking this type of work trip, but man, were there some moments when my timing was off.
Too many times I arrived at events too early or too late and left myself in a bad spot to reach the next event. Also, with so little downtime throughout the week, the precious moments of quiet that were to be found were extremely valuable, and often I failed to make the most of them.
Next time I'm at the Super Bowl I will absolutely be planning naps into my schedule. Between the late nights of blogging and early mornings for team media availabilities, I was running on fumes and adrenaline before the weekend even hit.
For anyone traveling to Super Bowl week, there's a lot more going on in town than just the game, and going in with a plan will save you a lot of stress that you'll appreciate saving.
I would take more pictures, but the right kind of pictures.
I am a terrible picture taker.
This is true both in the sense that I am a poor photographer, but also in the fact that I just don't like taking pictures that often. This is not great, as sometimes it is my job to take pictures, especially at big events like the freakin' Super Bowl.
I learned my lesson at halftime that trying to capture vivid moments on your phone is a losing effort, but on my next trip I'll take more pictures of the mundane moments in between the big ones.
They're a big part of the story too, and they help give me more options when I'm writing up stuff after the event.
I would try to work less while the Eagles were playing the Super Bowl.
For what it's worth, I would take the Eagles in the Super Bowl over my sustained mental health 10 times out of 10, but I would be lying if I said I was fully functional in the hours after Philadelphia's loss.
There's no complaining here — covering the big game is what let me attend it in the first place — but if you are planning a trip to see your team play in the Super Bowl, prepare to be emotionally drained like you have never been before regardless of the outcome.