2011 SUPER BOWL PLANNERS GET DO’S AND DON’TS

By Andrea Ahles/Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 11:38am

FREE AGENT: After leading the Tampa community to a great success with Super Bowl XLIII, Sigmon now looks for his next challenge.

The North Texas Super Bowl host committee brought in a visiting professor of sorts to tutor the staff on putting on the big game.

Members of the Tampa Bay host committee, who have put on four Super Bowls, including this year’s game, flew to the Metroplex on Monday and answered questions and gave tips on what to do and not to do when planning for the Super Bowl.

You can’t control the weather and you can’t control the game, but you try to plan as much as possible to try to make sure everything else goes as smoothly as possible," said Reid Sigmon, executive director of the Tampa Bay Super Bowl Host Committee.

Sigmon, who also worked on the 2005 Super Bowl in Jacksonville and the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa Bay, said the biggest challenge to hosting the game is understanding how all of the different pieces — logistics, volunteers, working with the NFL — fit together for the game to be a success.

Here are tips from their lessons learned:

• Educate the public about traffic routes and park-and-ride options for game day

• 1/2 hours before the game; that has Open the gates to the stadium 3 to 4 made the average wait time to get through security less than 15 minutes

• Have a volunteer and community campaign to get the area ready to greet the hundreds of thousands of guests. Tampa Bay had an ad campaign called "Put Your Game Face On" targeted at hotel and wait staff, cabdrivers and other industries that would be serving visitors.

• Be prepared for news media exposure. When the game was hosted by Tampa Bay in 2001, Sigmon said that only ESPN was doing live shots from the area. This year, ESPN was joined by ESPN Radio, Fox Sports, CNN and NBC, who all did live broadcasts, he said.

BY THE NUMBERS

The Tampa Bay Super Bowl Host Committee shared these tidbits:

4,589 news media professionals from 633 news organizations covered the event.
151.6 million television viewers watched the game.
90 hours of live television broadcasts by ESPN
924 limousines and 702 buses were used on game day.
6,000 volunteers were needed by the host committee.
$11 million budget, which included $7.2 million in private corporate sponsorships