It used to be that when you moved to another part of the country, you had to leave a lot behind. Every year this becomes less and less the case as technology advances. With video calls, people can live on opposite sides of the world and still manage to see each other frequently and stay connected.
With a myriad of listening and viewing options available, it is also much easier to stay connected with your favorite team.
The Difficulties of Staying Connected in the Past
If you go back 50 years, staying in touch with the happenings of your favorite team from another part of the country was quite difficult. If you were in another country, it was pretty much impossible.
If you were living in another state, then you had limited options for following the day-to-day actions of what was happening with your team back home. You could follow along with the box scores for all the games in the newspaper. You could watch games for your team on the occasion that they were playing the team in your new region or if they happened to be one of the random games broadcast. You could also scan the radio for a broadcast.
You could also call back home and talk to someone to hear all of the news about what was happening with your team. However, truly staying connected was a very tough task. Most of the time, you were better off adopting the team of your new region and following them primarily. You could still keep up with your old team when possible, but they would mainly be on the backburner.
Things Get Easier
Fast forward 25 years and things get a bit easier.
If you purchased a cable package, you had greatly increased your ability to watch games from your hometown with dedicated sports stations like ESPN. If you were an early adopter of the internet into your home, you had access to very slow dial-up information about your team.
While keeping up with your home team was still a bit of a chore, it was far more doable than it had been, and people were holding onto their loyalty to the team they had grown up rooting for with a tighter grip than they had previously done.
The Ease of Staying Connected in the Present
Coming another 25 years forward into the present, we find ourselves in an age where the only real restriction you have from supporting your childhood team is your ability to go watch them play live.
During the coronavirus pandemic, with stadiums largely closed to the public, watching your team live wasn’t typically an option whether you were living in your home town or not. For 2020, there was no significant difference between supporting your team at home or halfway around the world aside from the fact that the games would play at insane hours.
There are now countless ways to follow along with all of the action from any team in the world. You can get a high-speed internet connection nearly anywhere in the world these days. You can use that internet connection to connect with numerous websites that will have all of the information about your team you could ever wish to know.
Not only does your team have a website, but so does the league to which they belong. There are also plenty of fan sites and third-party sites with features like an api sports widget. There are sites for whatever interests you most. Some sites are dedicated to stats, while other focus on a team’s history. Some sights are all about the latest news and rumors.
In addition to all of that, there are plenty of options for watching or listening to your team play, wherever you may find yourself. The number of sports streaming platforms continues to grow all the time.
You don’t even have to restrict your viewing to your television. You can watch your team play on your laptop, tablet, or phone, making it easy to stay connected at all times.
Unfortunately, the one drawback is that there is no cohesive all-in-one sports streaming platform available for a reasonable price like those available for streaming scripted content.
Because of this, many people who would be happy to pay a small monthly fee for this service instead turn to the widely available illegal streams in order to watch their favorite team play when there is no option available on television.
The Possibilities of the Future
One would imagine that in another 25 years, this streaming option will certainly exist. Who knows, maybe we will be watching all of the games as holograms rather than on screens or through the eyes of the players in a virtual reality option. Whatever the case, it will surely only continue to get easier to root for your home team, wherever life takes you.