Every year, around mid-March, tens of thousands of people in the St. Louis Metro area decide to tough it out and go into work sick.  Be it a bad cold or mild case of the flu, they put it all on the line for holding out on that sick day just a couple more weeks … to use for the Cardinals’ Opening Day instead.

With Switch’s origins taking root mere blocks from St. Louis’ second cathedral, Busch Stadium, we have always been a proud and loyal supporter of our hometown team.  Even moving some highway exits away could not keep us away from our beloved Redbirds, as exhibited by the almost complete absence of staff that would come in each year on the day of the Home Opener.

We noted this phenomenon was not exclusive just to Switch. Friends and family throughout the country would take vacation, personal time or a sick day to celebrate their hometown teams. It seemed as though people viewed the day as a sort of a holiday.  So as an organization, Switch decided to make it just that.  But what good is a holiday you can’t celebrate with the ones your love?  We wanted this to become a day for everyone to stop and enjoy America’s past time.

In 2010, we began our campaign to Cardinals Opening Day: Make It a Holiday!  What started out as a tailgate slightly resembling a picket line from our office neighboring the stadium grew into a social media campaign 26,000+ fans strong.  Then this year, just four years after its original conception, fans’ cries were heard all the way from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Budweiser, a longtime partner of Switch, used its clout as baseball’s favored beer to get over 100,000 signatures from fans across the country on a petition that went right to The White House.  This petition went one step further though by asking to declare Major League Baseball Opening Day a national holiday.

While ultimately the White House decided not to make this a holiday, the campaign shed light on exactly how powerful of an impact, not just baseball, but all sports have on our lives.  Coke Zero created a campaign to make the day after Super Bowl a holiday.  The city of Chicago hosted an early Fourth of July party for a significant amount of the city’s workforce after the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup this past June.  Companies are even looking at different ways to make the NCAA March Madness tournament a device to increase productivity.

It’s undeniable, sports is one of those rare institutions that can bring communities together.  In this day-of-age where there is much fodder over the new Facebook layout, it is kind of nice to have things people can still share a friendly beer over.  We should preserve this good old-fashioned camaraderie.  By making it a holiday.