The NFL‘s Green Bay Packers have become the first team to launch a sober support station at their stadium thanks to a new program inspired by Phish fans in recovery. NBC‘s TODAY on Monday ran a segment detailing the initiative, dubbed Section Yellow.

Section Yellow was co-founded by John Plageman, a recovering alcoholic and longtime fan of both the Packers and jam bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead. According to an October 2022 profile on Section Yellow by Wisconsin Public Radio, Plageman had faced a dilemma in 2009, “three or four months” into quitting alcohol, when Phish played its reunion shows at Hampton Coliseum. He worried that the Phish concert environment, a scene in which drugs and alcohol are ever-present, might threaten his newfound sobriety.

Before long, however, he linked up with The Phellowship, a group of fans in recovery who gather under a yellow balloon at concerts to hold twelve-step meetings and provide a supportive atmosphere for others attempting to navigate their sober journeys on Phish tour. He went on to become a volunteer for the group a few years later.

“Yellow balloon” groups at concerts stretch back to the early ’80s with Grateful Dead tour’s Wharf Rats. Today, you can see them at an array of different shows and events, from Umphrey’s McGee‘s Much Obliged and The String Cheese Incident‘s The Jellyfish to Bonnaroo‘s Soberoo and its expanded, traveling sister initiative, Harmonium, which sets up shop at festivals across the country.

Related: Mini-Documentary Gives Inside Look At The Sober Community Within The Jam Scene [Watch]

In 2019, during a Phish show at East Troy, WI’s Alpine Valley Music Theatre, Plageman had the idea to extend the concept behind The Phellowship to his beloved Green Bay Packers, whose iconic Lambeau Field is similarly famous for its alcohol-heavy culture.

While 14 NFL teams have now established alcohol-free seating sections at their stadium, Lambeau’s Section Yellow is the first to officially install a designated support station for fans who don’t drink.

In the TODAY segment, Plageman talks to NBC’s Sam Block about the philosophy behind Section Yellow from his living room/Packers shrine. “Section Yellow is not anything about abolishing or saying no to drinking,” he explains. “We just want to give a safe area for people that are sober.”

With The Phellowship as their model, Plageman and the Section Yellow team have set up shop with a “yellow balloon” table at Packers home games, offering information to newcomers, support to members of the sober community, and friendship to those seeking to keep enjoying the things they love without the involvement of alcohol.

The segment goes on to introduce a pair of Packers fans, Lexi Sokol and Ruth Farrow, who met via the Section Yellow Facebook group and wound up attending the game together as sober buddies. “Section Yellow provides that community,” an excited Farrow tells Block at Lambeau. “We can come together and conquer stuff and, like, meet strangers and go to Packer games!”

Adds Sokol, “I get asked all the time, ‘How do you have fun [at the game] if you can’t drink? Well, she [Farrow] knows exactly how to have fun if you don’t drink. We’ve been having a complete blast since we got here.”

As Plageman notes from in front of the Section Yellow table during the game, “We are in a stadium that holds up to 82,000 people and probably 80,000 of them are consuming some beverage that contains alcohol, so we want [the rest] to know that they’re not alone.” Representatives for both the Packers and the NFL also add that they hope to see similar initiatives take hold across the league in the future.

One show at a time, one game at a time, one day at a time. Good on you, Section Yellow. Keep coming back. Watch the full TODAY segment below.

“NFL Creates Sober Sections In Some Stadiums” – TODAY

Connections between the worlds of Phish and the NFL have seemed to become increasingly common in the last decade. In the summer of 2013, during a performance at The Gorge in George, WA, Trey Anastasio made a plea to the Seattle Seahawks for Phish’s “Wilson” chant to become the fight song for the team’s then-quarterback, Russell Wilson. Sure enough, Wilson and the Seahawks fanbase adopted the “Wilson” chant at CenturyLink Field during the 2013–2014 season—which ended with a Super Bowl title. Following that season, NFL Films wound up making a 15-minute documentary about the Phish/Seahawks connection. In 2022, Anastasio was once again the subject of an NFL Films documentary about his love for longtime New York Jets center Nick Mangold. Watch the full video here.

Trey Anastasio has also been sober for the better part of two decades and has used his platform to promote recovery services on various occasions. In 2020, his The Beacon Jams residency raised more than $1 million for the Divided Sky Foundation, which is poised to open a recovery center in Ludlow, VT later this year.