There are times when you just can’t go tailgating. Normally those times are when your team is playing on the road and it is either too far or too expensive to support your team away from home. But one of the things we all love about tailgating is the camaraderie we share with other fans while out in the parking lot before the game. When watching the game on TV you lose that if you are alone or with a small group of people. That is why many fans like to get together with other fans at sports bars and root on their team together. But finding a bar that is local and is the designated watch party location of your favorite team is often times difficult. Unless you still live near the city of your favorite team, locating a bar that supports your out of town team was difficult. That is until now. Introducing Team Bar Finder.
Simply explained, a team bar is a sports bar that is typically outside of the local area of a particular team but is a friendly place to go for that team’s fans to congregate. Still confused? Check out this video taken inside Finnerty’s in New York City when the San Francisco Giants won the World Series.
Pretty crazy considering that bar is over 3,000 miles away from the City by the Bay. That bar is also packed on Sundays during football season with what else, San Francisco 49ers fans. So how does a fan from San Francisco living in New York or a LSU alumnus find a bar in Seattle show their game surrounded by other like-minded fans> Team Bar Finder.
Using Team Bar Finder is quite simple. First, select the region where you would like to watch the game. At the top left, you will see a pull down menu that lists countries and within each country, major metropolitan areas. Select the city where you would like to watch the game and that map will come up with all the team bars within that region.
Depending on your search criteria and if there is a team bar that fits your search, it will return a result or multiple results. Depending on the size of the school or how popular the professional team is outside of their local area will increase the odds of there being a team bar dedicated to supporting that team’s fans. One tip we would suggest would be if you are searching in an area that is close to another state, i.e. Washington DC, we would suggest you search in multiple states like in Virginia or Maryland. Same advice would go for those people searching for a bar near Kansas City. Searching in both Missouri and Kansas will yield the most accurate results.
Now it is time for true confessions. The same person that created TailgatingIdeas.com back in 2007, Dave Lamm, is the same person who has created Team Bar Finder. His reasoning for starting Team Bar Finder started the same was when starting this tailgating blog. The genesis of Team Bar Finder was born more of out a necessity back on January 8, 2009.
It was in early 2009 that Oklahoma was playing Florida in the BCS National Championship Game. While traveling for business in January 2009, Dave, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, wanted to watch the BCS National Championship Game with other Sooner fans like himself. His business trip took him to Las Vegas and rather than trying to watch the game in the race and sports book in the casino of the hotel he was staying at, he figured there had to be an Oklahoma team bar somewhere within a fairly short cab ride. But how to find where there is such a bar would have taken a while and he just didn’t have that much time to spend on Google, Facebook, MeetUp or Twitter doing internet searches and still have time to see kick-off.
Because there was no such resource like TeamBarFinder.com to easily and quickly tell him where the closest Oklahoma team bar was in Las Vegas, he ended up ordering room service and watching the game on the TV in his hotel room. When his food arrived and the game started, he thought to himself, “there has to be a better way”. It was that “ah-ha!” moment when he decided he would research the idea of putting together a resource where the information would not only be stored but would be easily searched and dispensed.
It has taken a few years to get the idea hammered out and put into motion but Team Bar Finder recently re-launched this past summer. Of course with it being such a recent launch, the database is nowhere near being complete. Slowly but surely the database will get filled but keep in mind, there are literally hundreds of teams either professional or college and there can be upwards of 100 bars for each team depending on the team’s popularity. (Just imagine how many team bars there are for the Green Bay Packers or the Pittsburgh Steelers?)
We would encourage you to check it out and if you know of a bar that is particularly favorable to a certain team, you can Submit a Team Bar to the database. More and more team bars will be added daily but it will just take time. The goal is get all teams and all bars loaded into the system throughout the football season. It might be a tall task but we are up for the challenge.
In addition to your own knowledge, we would suggest you share Team Bar Finder with other on message boards, Facebook or Twitter. The more people that know about it, the more bars and restaurants that can be added. Think of it as “paying it forward” to other sports fans that would like to watch a game with other fans like themselves. And who knows? You may be traveling away from home and want to watch the game. You’ll be glad someone suggested the only Pittsburgh Steelers bar in Rome, Italy.
UPDATE: In addition to finding your favorite team’s bar, what about the soccer fans? There are plenty of fans of the “beautiful game” out there that would like to take in a match with other footy fans. A sister site to Team Bar Finder is FutbolPubs.com.
FutbolPubs.com works much like Team Bar Finder in that if you are a fan of a particular team and looking for a team specific location, i.e. Arsenal Bars, you can search for a specific team. But FC Pubs is a place to find football friendly spots to watch a match.
FutbolPubs.com just started up and is need of more location listings. If you know of any bars or pubs that shows soccer matches, please feel free to Submit a FC Pub.