How To Properly Celebrate A Super Bowl Win When You Can't Be Home

Following the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl victory, tight end Travis Kelce summed up the feelings of all of Chiefs Kingdom with one song lyric:

Gif via Giphy

While Travis was certainly right, those of us who are in college may have had to fight just a little bit harder than our fellow Chiefs fans. Being in college and away from home when your favorite sports team wins a major championship is difficult for a multitude of reasons. For starters, the pool of people who want to celebrate with you is significantly smaller. While my parents were popping champagne with all of their friends back home, I was being reminded by fans of the Patriots that Tom Brady had still won five more Super Bowls than Patrick Mahomes. Secondly, it's much harder to feel like a part of the festivities that occur in the following days when you can't physically be there. In 2015 when the Royals won the World Series, my high school cancelled school on the day of the parade to ensure that all of us could be a part of one of the best celebrations in Kansas City history. Surprisingly, Syracuse University did not make the same accommodations for me and the other six students from the KC area this year.

So how do we, as college students, find a way to be a part of something so special to us when we're nowhere near home? The answer is actually quite simple. We take advantage of social media and the growing nature of digital platforms that are being used to discuss and view sports. A recent study found that from 2016 to 2019, the usage of social media to watch or follow sporting events has increased by 47%. That number tops almost every other motivation for going online that we can think of, including staying up-to-date with current events (12%) and to network with other people (-11%). The growth of sports content on social media channels and the capabilities of our digital platforms could not be lining up at a better time for college students. Engagement has become a huge topic for brands and organization as we've entered the era of social media, and few fields have mastered that quite like sports. Access to video clips, the ability to live-tweet, and the power of streaming services, give anyone the ability to know everything that happened during an event or game without even watching the official stream.

Tying all of this back to our conversation about celebrating, using social media can get you as close to that feeling of being home than anything else. When Kendall Fuller had his game-sealing interception off of Jimmy Garoppolo, I could experience what it meant to my friends because of their tweets in the instant that it happened. When the feeling of victory had finally sunk in, I could share in that joy with my sister via FaceTime. While sitting in a computer lab working on a graphic design project, I was able to share in the excitement that my friends who still live at home were having at the parade downtown because their Instagram stories captured all of the action from their perspective. Better yet, I even had the ability to stream the live coverage from my local news station and follow along from the lab room.

Photo of my stream of the parade from a Syracuse computer lab. (Credit: Aaron Swartz)

For all of my other sports fans who are away from home, if your team ever wins the big one in whatever sport it may be, I encourage you to take advantage of the power of digital communication that exists at our fingertips. People love to say we've become addicted to our phones, but for days like these, maybe that's not such a bad thing.