Enhance Your Experience
Enhancing Your Experience: How To Get Your Information And Voice Your Opinion
In our third and final installment of Enhancing Your Experience, we take a look at the many ways to get your information and the easiest ways to voice your opinion.
The main sources of information about the team usually come from either the Buffalo News or the Sabres website. National media sources do on occasion break large stories about the team, but mostly the beat writers, John Vogl and Mike Harrington, have the pulse of the team down and get out all of the major news on a timely basis.
From there, the Sabres blogosphere takes that news and usually runs with it. There are a bunch of great sites out there to check out if you haven't already, The Goose's Roost, Willful Caboose, Top Shelf, Black, Blue, and Gold, among many others. There will always be many opposing opinions on the internet, if you read the comments here you would know that already, but hashing out your feelings about a team is what makes sports great.
Facebook and Twitter are great sources of information too. All of the writers of any particular site at least have a twitter page, you can find ours here, and others use Facebook to reach out and share links and opinions, our Facebook page is here.
Most fans like to voice their opinion about the team they follow. Its usually a rite of passage to call into a sports radio show, but the internet has made it so much easier these days to make your opinions heard. The easiest way to get your voice out there is to start your own blog. There are many great sites to do it that are free like Blogger and Wordpress, but there is one major hitch that comes with it. While it is easy to start a blog, its really hard to keep a good blog running. It takes a lot of time and commitment to do so to make it your opinion sound coherent and to get people to continually come back and read it.
If you don't want to do the work yourself, you could comment on other sites or you could use our handy FanPost function to get your message out to the world. Our handy fanpost guide is here.
Enhancing Your Experience: Avoiding The Worst Type Of Fan
In this week's installment of enhancing your experience, we take a look at the fans at the arena that we want to avoid at all cost. These are the people that bug us while we watch the game on television or try to enjoy the game at the arena. When you see them, avoid at all cost:
The Cell Phone Guy
We have all seen this guy on TV, trying to mug for his fifteen seconds of fame as he stands up talking his buddy at home trying to find him on TV. He bugs the people behind him because he blocks the ice in the middle of play and he bugs people watching it on TV because he's just plain annoying.
If any of you who are reading this are that person, I have one favor to ask, please stop. You aren't that special and we can't really figure out who you are anyways.
The Guy Who Yells Shoot All The Time
We have all been there before at a game. The Sabres go on the power play and pass the puck continually to the point of frustration. Which at that point, you feel compelled to yell shoot. It happens, we've all been there. Please don't be the person that yells shoot as soon as a Sabres player touches the puck though. Don't you think that the players on the ice know a better time to shoot than you do?
How To Enhance The Arena Experience At HSBC Arena
The sites around the network, thanks to Samsung, are taking a look at different ways to enhance fan experience. Over the next three weeks, we will take a look at making your experience better by examining things like home experience, arena experience, and overall good fan rules. This week's installment deals with arena issues.
The arena experience could be upgraded in a few different ways. The first and easiest upgrade would be the team that we are watching on the ice in front of us. Since the team hasn't won a game at home yet, a decent playing team would be appreciated by the home fans.
My second suggestion would deal with swag that most teams hand out to their paying customers. About the only thing that Sabres fans get during a normal regular season is a magnet schedule while most other teams entice paying customers with bobbleheads and other cool things. Most of those teams use these promotions to entice people to actually buy tickets which wasn't a problem for the past few seasons but appears to be more of an issue.
The arena itself, even in a fortieth anniversary celebration, seems to be devoid of its history. While the members of the Sabres Hall of Fame are all honored around the arena, you really couldn't tell that there was a hockey team outside of the arena devoid of the giant mural that covers the parking garage walkway. There should be some sort of honor outside of the arena and some more historic pictures as you walk around the arena. At least giving a mention to the arena's other tenant, the Bandits, would be a nice touch as well.
There are many more things that can be said: better food and beer choices, better in-game and intermission entertainment, and others. Different fans have different experiences, so tell me what I missed in the comments.

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