On Sunday, Feb. 7, 2016, more than 110 million people will turn their televisions to CBS to watch the biggest sporting event of the year, second only to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil: Super Bowl 50 at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, San Jose's neighboring city. While most of them will be fixated on the field -- or the big-budget commercials -- meeting and event planners will fix their collective gaze on the City of San Jose, whose performance hosting the Super Bowl will serve as an audition for future large-scale events, including major meetings and conventions.
After all, when you take away the tailgating, the pigskin, the face painting, and the victors' glitzy rings, that's all the Super Bowl really is: a mega convention hosted by the National Football League (NFL) for its players, owners, sponsors, and fans.
"The game, of course, is the thing that's most televised, but there are so many other ancillary events that go along with it all week long," explains Karolyn Kirchgesler, CEO of San Jose's convention and visitors bureau,
Team San Jose, which also manages the
San Jose McEnery Convention Center in downtown San Jose. "It's like nothing I've ever seen."
Among the events planned for Super Bowl week in San Jose are the following:
- Super Bowl Opening Night Fueled by Gatorade on Feb. 1, during which media will interview members of the Super Bowl teams in front of a live audience at San Jose's SAP Center indoor arena
- The SoFA Winter Market on Feb. 5 and 6, featuring artists, craft retailers, live music, and DIY activities in San Jose's artsy SoFA District
- Ice skating at San Jose's Downtown Ice public ice-skating rink
- The Super Guadalupe River Run 5k and 10k run at Guadalupe River Park on Feb. 7
- Super San Pedro Square, which will transform San Jose's San Pedro Square into a weeklong street fair featuring games, chalk art, dining, and entertainment
- It's Happening! Winter at Plaza de Cesar Chavez, which will transform San Jose's historic Plaza de Cesar Chavez into an outdoor café and beer garden, information center, mini football field, and food truck festival during the day, and an entertainment venue with live music and LED light shows at night
"All these events are a chance to showcase great ideas, create things for locals to do, and, for Team San Jose, make San Jose shine for visitors," Kirchgesler says.
With so much going on during Game Week, there's no room in San Jose for other groups. In fact, the NFL reserved most of the city's hotel rooms and each of its major venues when it chose the game's host city in 2013, including the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, which is reserved all week for private meetings and events being hosted by the NFL, the Super Bowl teams, and their many sponsors. Once the game is over, however, Team San Jose will welcome association and corporate groups back with open arms. And thanks to the game, the city's meeting product will be better than ever, according to Kirchgesler.
For one, she says, the city has made several improvements for Game Week that will remain in place long after it. For the aforementioned events in Plaza de Cesar Chavez, for example, the city made $150,000 in privately-funded improvements to the park, including new permanent lighting and furniture that will benefit groups holding events there in the future.
Then there are the new intra-city relationships that have been forged. "To pull off an event of this magnitude, everyone in the city has to communicate and work together," Kirchgesler says. "If we needed something for a convention group, there are people I wouldn't have known to go to before who I would go to now to say, 'Hey, how do we get this done?'"
The San Jose McEnery Convention Center, which will be used for private meetings and events hosted by the NFL and sponsors In the process of organizing Super Bowl events, for instance, Kirchgesler discovered a venue she'd never seen before at San Jose's Mexican Heritage Plaza cultural center. "It's a great, unique meeting site," she explains. "Even better: I met the people there and they're a wonderful resource for connecting us with all sorts of cultural communities -- local artists, musicians, speakers. I'm discovering a wealth of resources that I wouldn't have had a chance to discover if it weren't for the Super Bowl."
Yet another post-Super Bowl perk for groups will be the education and training that's been offered to locals in advance of the event. Front-line employees at Mineta San Jose International Airport, for instance, have received training to help them identify human trafficking. Local law enforcement likewise has received special security training. Meanwhile, new Airbnb hosts in town have been educated on how to sell the city.
Simply put: For everyone from Uber drivers to the mayor, the Super Bowl is an opportunity to build San Jose's hospitality muscles, which will grow bigger and stronger to the benefit of future meetings and conventions.
"We haven't worked harder or longer hours in a long time, but we haven't been this energized either," concludes Kirchgesler, who says Team San Jose now knows better than ever that it's capable of almost anything. "After this, everything else we do is going to seem easy."