Attention PhinNation members in the New York & New Jersey area!
If you’re a Miami Dolphins fan that lives in the New York/New Jersey area, we have some good news for you. Our friends at Dolfans NYC are once again organizing the #MetLifeTakeover. That’s right, Dolphins fans are invading the New Jersey swamp for the Dolphins/Jets game coming up on September 16th. Dolfans NYC does a great job organizing this event to help mobilize Dolphins fans from the region (and beyond!). Click here to visit the official #MetLifeTakeover site for all of the information for this year’s event. Check out the video below from the 2017 #MetLifeTakeover:
As you can see, it’s a huge Dolphins crowd and the fun starts with an epic tailgate. Special guests last year included Joe Rose, Nat Moore, Tom Garfinkel, and many more. By the way, if you want to check out other #MetLifeTakeovers, check out the other videos here.
We reached out to Nate ‘Igor’ Smith, one of the Dolfans NYC founders, to dig into the details a little bit further:
PhinNation: Who makes up DolfansNYC and how did it all get started?
Igor (Dolfans NYC): Dolfans NYC was founded by Michelle Kramers and myself (Nate Igor Smith) after the 2008 NFL season. We were watching with a small group of people at a bar called Third and Long in Manhattan and by the end of that famous Wildcat playoff season our group had grown to a group of about 30 people. Michelle and I both have marketing backgrounds and ran our own websites so we decided to team up and try and create an “official” NYC fan club. We set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account and by week one of 2009 we had a line out of the door. The club grew quickly and we moved to a larger bar Slattery’s Midtown Pub where the crowd can be as big as 400 people for a big game.
The #MetLifeTakeover was started just on our Facebook page as a way to sit together with a bunch of Dolphins fans so we would be a bit safer at Jets games. That group of 30 the first year grew to 70 the next year and then 200 and then it exploded to 750 and now we average over 1000 people sitting together every year with even more meeting up for our massive tailgate party as well. While the name #MetLifeTakeover wasn’t coined until the Jets moved from Giants Stadium to the new MetLife Stadium this will mark our 9th year doing a group trip!
PhinNation: Your organization donates a lot do the Dolphins foundation and other charities, how do you raise money for these charities and how can Dolfans help?
Igor (Dolfans NYC): Our biggest fundraiser is the #MetLifeTakeover. We get a discount on tickets from the Jets for buying so many so while we are still selling tickets for face value we are making money on each ticket. We partner with a catering company called Urban Tailgate who give us a small cut of their ticket sales as well. Add that to the raffles we do and the merch we sell and we actually make a pretty significant amount of money which goes right back into the club. Anything left over goes to charity and we have donated tens of thousands of dollars to different charities over the years including nearly $15,000 last year alone! If you can’t make it to one of our events and want to make a tax deductible donation you can do so by sending money via PayPal to dolfansnyc@gmail.com.
If you live in the area or plan to be in the area, we would highly encourage you to join in the fun of the #MetLifeTakeover! You can following Dolfans NYC on Twitter @DolfansNYC
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