Over the past several weeks, I set out to answer a question that sounds simple but isn’t: what do D.C.-area sports fans actually need and want to help them follow their teams?
I thought that was the whole question. It turned out to be the doorway to a much bigger one.
So, I asked dozens of people across the D.C. region — inside multiple local sports venues, including Nationals Park, Audi Field and CareFirst Arena, and well beyond them in D.C., across Virginia, and as far in Maryland as Hagerstown and the edges of Anne Arundel County.
They ranged across ages, backgrounds and rooting interests, and included the kinds of fans we all recognize: the die-hards, the casuals, the transplants rooting for somebody else, and the people who barely (if ever) follow sports at all.
That last group was the hardest to reach. People who don’t care about sports don’t answer a call for sports fans — not caring is the whole point. So to hear from them honestly, I went to a few people in my own life I knew would give it to me straight (my sister, Lauren, among them; she can take or leave a game and has never once sugarcoated anything for me).
The risk in asking people who know you is that they’ll tell you the truth about themselves — and, every so often, about you. That candor helped form the spine of this series.
This series walks you through what these various people told me: where they go to find the latest on their teams, what they’re missing, who they really are as fans versus who they think they are — and, at the end of it, what still connects us to sports in the first place. The answer had almost nothing to do with coverage — and everything to do with why people keep sports close.
Part 1 (Monday, July 13): The struggle of convenience for sports fans
Part 2 (Tuesday, July 14): Why the commute is clutch time for sports fans
Part 3 (Wednesday, July 15): Tickets, streaming and betting — the rising cost of being a sports fan
Part 4 (Thursday, July 16): The fan you think you are vs. the fan you actually are
Part 5 (Friday, July 17): Family, community and the enduring power of fandom
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