The season for sports, and more importantly, the season for tailgating is coming around. This is the time of year when people come together to get riled up for their favorite sports team and have that time to enjoy a party with their friends and family.
There are a few keys to throwing an unforgettable tailgate party. You need to focus on bringing elements like high-quality food and drinks, great music, games, and ways to watch the game together. With everything together, the perfect tailgate party is right around the corner.
This is a guide to helping you create the absolute best tailgate party imaginable. It will have your friends begging you to throw more, and your car will be the center hub for everyone’s excitement on game day.
Prepare Sumptuous Meals and Drinks
A lot of tailgating revolves around eating and drinking while pretending to watch the game on TV. This is one of the key focal points for creating the best tailgating party ever.
Good food will take time but make tailgating more enjoyable. The secret to making great tailgating food is to do the prep work and make it all fresh. People will remember a delicious barbecue pork sandwich that came right out of the smoker. People won’t want to remember a cold burger that was obviously grilled a few days earlier.
To get this done, and get it done well, you want to keep your ingredients fresh. Portable electric coolers work much better than any coolers you’ve probably brought to games before. People use these to live out of their vans, and they work great for tailgating parties as well.
Inside those coolers, you’ll also want to stash a massive amount of drinks. Cold beers, soda, tea, and sparkling water are great options to keep everyone happy. One way that tailgating parties will come to a quick close is to run out of enough drinks to last the game.
Another great idea for good drinks is to bring a small coffee maker. This will help everyone stay away from the mid-game desire to take a quick nap rather than keep partying.
You won’t see many coffee makers or electric coolers at other people’s tailgate parties. They simply lack the right power source to be able to do it. The portable power station is the best choice.
Power up with a Portable Power Station
Many people will plug straight into their car battery at tailgating parties, but you need to be super careful with how much power you’re actually taking. You still need to get home at the end of the game, and you can’t do that with a dead battery.
The best power source for a tailgate party is a portable power station. Combine the power station with portable solar panels to make a solar generator and you can power the whole party all day long. Power stations like the Growatt INFINITY 1500 are ready to take on the massive task of powering your tailgate party. Any time someone needs their phone charged, you can have multiple outlets ready to charge devices quickly and simultaneously.
You also might want a smaller portable power station to charge your electronic devices. The best part of a portable power station isn’t just that it has the electrical capacity to power your coolers, TVs, speakers, and coffee makers. When it gets in the way, you simply shift it over to a better spot. It’s flexible and can move around so you don’t have to design your party around it.
The solar generator on your perfect sunny game day will quietly bring power to the whole party without anyone even knowing it’s there. People will keep asking about how you can get this much power without plugging it into your car, but it’s your secret to keep.
People will remember the party that had the game on all day, had drinks in the cooler getting colder as the day went forward, and never lacked a single watt for the entire day.
Related: Using A Tailgate Generator for Tailgating - Buying Guide
Prepare Some Great Music
Game day can be loud. There are sports fans all over the place cheering for their racer or their team. Sometimes it can be hard to get a second to take a breather. Music is an addition to the tailgate atmosphere that can help add to the noise without making it feel even more crowded.
Parties that have the right music at the right time are always the best. The level of planning is low, and you don’t need to do anything but hit play every now and again.
Start with a good playlist. You want to create a lively atmosphere, but not one that brings all of the focus to dancing or hardcore partying. The music acts more as a background during the times when the game is at pause or hasn’t started yet.
Having a solid set of outdoor speakers will also help up the quality of your party. You can use them for both the game and the music. If people show up to your party and can’t even hear the announcers for the game, there will be some that get frustrated about not knowing what’s going on.
The goal is to have everyone be able to hear the game, but not let the quiet moments start to lull. Hook these speakers into your portable power station and you’ll only need to worry about cranking the volume for people in the back and timing the music right.
Use a Large-Screen TV or Rent an Outdoor LED Display
On to potentially the most important part of the party for some people. The screen. This will be the main focus for a lot of people that come to any tailgating party. They want to see the game, and they want to see it clearly.
A big TV screen can take up a lot of space and a lot of power. You’ll need to think about how many guests may be coming to your party, and you can make a TV choice from there. A bigger TV will help people hang far in the back, but not miss anything important going on.
To power the TV, you need to think back to your portable power station. A gas generator or a car battery simply won’t cut it. The gas generator will be the only thing anyone hears all day long, and the car battery will work for maybe an hour before going ka-put.
The only perfect answer here is solar panels combined with a portable power station. You can run off the sun when it’s there and have the power station feeding juice in for when a cloudy day comes around.
Throw in Games for Fun
While the game is enough entertainment for most people, there will certainly be a few folks at your party that don’t want to watch it the entire time. Games are a great way to keep everyone at the party happy even when the sports game is going into overtime or just isn’t that exciting for some.
Games like bags, horseshoes, or backyard golf are perfect for a tailgating party. It gives a few people something to casually play around with while everyone else is fixated on your TV.
Bring multiple options just to give people the choice to play one or the other. Unforgettable tailgate parties are all about having what everyone wants rather than forcing them to play a game they might not be too interested in because it’s the only option.
Provide Blankets or Heaters for Your Guests to Keep Warm
Many games are going to take place in the winter or early spring, depending on the sport that you’re interested in watching.
If your sport is more of a cold weather one, you’ll want to be ready for the cold snap with blankets and heaters.
Watching sports isn’t a very active activity in itself. There’s a lot of sitting around, and that’s when people start to get really cold. This is where heaters and blankets come into play.
There are a lot of great propane gas heaters available out there and some electric ones as well. Remember, you have the best portable power station for a tailgate party, so you don’t need to worry about getting power to your heaters to stay warm.
Once people get cold, they’ll be uncomfortable. Don’t let it be your strategy to just make people move around when they’re cold. That will make this tailgate party unforgettable in the wrong ways.
Provide Lots of Seating for Your Guests
Games can go on for hours and hours at a time. Nobody is going to be able to stand for the entire time, especially after eating and drinking so much.
Providing a lot of seating options is super helpful to make a great tailgate party. People can relax when they need to and then skyrocket out of their chairs when their team is about to win.
Lawn chairs have proven to be the best option for seating at tailgating events over the years. They’re super portable, lightweight, and cheap, and when you want to move them around, you can. You don’t need to mess with any big furniture. Keep it simple.
For the kids, simply lay a few blankets out on the ground near the TV and they can roll around while semi-watching the game going on.
Final Thought: Having the Best Power Source is Important
We’ve already talked about it, but it’s absolutely crucial to throwing a good tailgate party. You simply need to ensure that you have the right power source for your party.
Emergency Backup
Imagine watching a game going on and all of a sudden the power shuts down. Your team was about to score, maybe there was just a huge crash or injury. There are so many high-adrenaline moments that come about when watching sports that you can’t simply miss. A good power source will make sure you don’t miss them.
Quieter and Effective
Yes, you can bring along the traditional gas generator, but then the only thing people will hear during the game is the loud drilling of the motor running. Using a portable solar generator is silent and just as effective.
Versatile Outlets
A good portable power station also has multiple power outlets so your guests can charge their phones simultaneously and make sure they don’t miss any big news or opportunities to share about what’s going on at the party.
Portable
One of the best parts of the portable power station is its ability to move. You can hide it away under a truck’s tailgate so it isn’t in the way at all. A solar generator like VITA 550 takes up little space and you need to enlist friends just to get it loaded before and after the game.
These days, there’s nothing better than a solar generator. It’s clean energy that improves the party’s overall atmosphere without taking away all of the fun that requires a lot of power.
