7 Minute Miles

Life after LII


Now a full month in the rear-view mirror, Super Bowl LII is history. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to have this over and done – we’ve been talking and working towards that day for more than two years. I wrote a tweet about looking forward to the Monday after, but even that day had an early start and a full day of work breaking things down to prepare for the next event in the building.

People have asked me how it went, what would I do differently and how many celebrities I saw. My number one goal was to not be in the newspaper for the wrong reason, so mission accomplished in that regard. In fact, we did get some great press about crushing the WiFi record, so I’m very happy with that. The Super Bowl isn’t truly our event – the NFL runs and controls everything and we just assist as needed, so there wasn’t much I could really change. As for stars, I (politely) asked Peyton Manning to get out of my way, but that was about it.

The NFL uses many different companies to help put on the event and it was a pleasure working with all of them. In the technology realm, we worked with WBL Services of Seattle, owned by Bill Lipscomb. He and his team of nerds (lead by the super smart Nikos Mouat) were a huge help in supporting not only the stadium, but all of the activations around the metro. Todd Barnes and his team from Populous performed with a logistical calmness that would drive most people insane. I was also impressed with the graphics team from bluemedia, who created signage and displays all around town that looked beautiful.

In addition to all of these groups, we re-enlisted many of the people that helped design and build the stadium to come back for game day support. This included my favorite team of engineers from CenturyLink (Andy, Mark, Evan, Dennis and Greg) and the amazing group of WiFi experts at AmpThink, lead by Bill Anderson and Wesley Terry. Parsons, Cisco, Verizon and WIN also had small armies of support people ready to help if needed and the Department of Homeland Security had our back monitoring for network threats the entire time. And kudos to the NBC broadcast crew, who really turned out to be self-supporting the entire week.

So what’s next? Personally, I’m going on vacation later this month with the whole family. Events like the Super Bowl require a ton of time away from home and come with a stress level that is not “super” beneficial for one’s health, so it will be good to get away and recharge. I’ll also pay a visit this month to Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the home of Super Bowl LIII. Their team was up here before our event and I’m looking forward to sharing stories (and seeing their cool new building). Everyone is now talking about the Final Four, but we have a whole lot of other work to do before then. Never a dull moment…

Originally published by DK on March 6, 2018 at 2:39 pm in Football, Longform, Personal, Work


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