What Wrexham has done for me and my family

What Wrexham has done for me and my family: So, let me start off by saying that I am a bit of an introvert. I rarely ever get on social media, often teasing my wife and kid about how much time they spend on socials themselves. Most of the time I keep to myself, sitting quietly at home playing video games and only socializing with my family and small group of friends. I don’t have a lot of close friends but the friends I do have are absolutely amazing and the best friends a person could ask for. They are the reason that I still live where I do. I also never had any interest in watching football, thinking it was boring and I never understood why people loved it so much.

When I finished watching the first season of Welcome to Wrexham, I started following the club on Facebook. Every weekend I would see posts from the club about who had scored a goal and updates on wins and losses. Mostly wins. Up the town! I thought it would be more fun to take this to the next level and found myself really wanting to watch the matches live. With some advice from a friend, I went outside my comfort zone and created a Twitter profile named after Wrexham and my city of Phoenix to try and find more local fans with whom I could watch games with.

At first, it wasn’t easy finding local fans. I was very naïve and thought it would be just as easy as finding Lakers fans… I was wrong. I did eventually meet a couple of local fans (that I am now proud to call friends) but I still couldn’t find any watch parties to attend.

Not giving up on my quest to find more fans, I continued to be active on social media. My hope was that my profile name would help me to find others in my area. I really had no idea what I was doing; in fact, I often feel like I still don’t. My history is that of avoiding having an active presence on social media for most of my life. Regardless of my past and lack of knowledge, I stuck with it and started branching out and talking to some interesting and genuinely incredible people from Wrexham and other places around the world.

Until, that is, the National League made a streaming service available worldwide thanks to the efforts of Ryan Reynolds. Every Saturday morning I began to set my alarm, wake up early and watch the games live with all my new friends on social media. All while being careful not to wake my wife and daughter. Eventually, my wife started getting up with me. She would sit by me and read a book while I watched the games. After a few weeks of this, she put her books down and started showing interest in the games. Since she was interested in Wrexham AFC, we watched Welcome to Wrexham together (my 2nd time) and her interest grew. It was about this time that our kid started asking us to wake her up to watch with us. I guess our excited yells piqued her curiosity.

Soon, it was nearing the end of the football season. I still hadn’t been able to meet any other fans outside of social media. So I decided that if I couldn’t find a watch party, I would start my own. What better game to have our first watch party than Wrexham vs Boreham Wood, April 22 2023? I was able to convince a few of my friends to come watch with me and my new friend, the amazing Ran (@Beeriobeario). It was amazing experiencing that particular game surrounded by my family, friends and soon to be Wrexham AFC fan friends. I was ecstatic that I finally had someone else to talk to and cheer on the Red Dragons with, someone who shares a similar love for the club that I do. My whole family had such an incredible time cheering and singing songs. It really made me feel good to see how happy they were and how much fun they were having.

Now here I am almost a year later. Our roles are reversed and my wife is teasing me about being on social media all the time. My other new friend Steve (@habsfanaz) took my family and me to our first football game to see the local team, Phoenix Rising (for whom we are seriously considering purchasing season tickets for next year). I even got up early with everyone else and was lucky enough to get tickets to the Wrexham vs Manchester United game in San Diego. The tickets cost a small fortune; I wouldn’t even pay this much for Lakers tickets in the NBA finals, just to give you an idea of what I spent on game tickets alone. My wife and I are even planning to visit Wrexham when we celebrate our next wedding anniversary. Now that we have memberships, we pray every night that we will be able to get tickets to a game while we are there. If not, we hope to end up at the Turf or Wrexham Lager Club.

What started as me being curious about whether or not the documentary was some strange publicity stunt or some wacky adventure that could bankrupt a couple of movie stars, turned into something that was much more. Thanks to this experience, I have been chatting with people from all around the world. I’ve made incredible friends in Wrexham like Jason (@jrwxm1864) that offered to take us around and some have even invited us into their home. Most importantly though, this whole thing has brought my family closer together. For the first time, we aren’t all rooting for different teams but we all cheer on the same team together, as a family.

I don’t know if my story will ever reach Rob & Ryan. I would like them to know how much this experience has meant to me and my family. So thank you Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds for buying a club and thereby not only improving the lives of many people in a small town in Wales, but helping me discover a community of die hard Wrexham AFC fans that I am proud to call my friends and for helping my family realize a love for football and binding us more closely together as Red Dragon supporters.

Up!

The!

Town!