Home Base in South Bay – Exploring Boston While Rooting in Foxboro

For our recent family trip to the NCAA Lacrosse Championships, we made a strategic decision: stay in Boston, play in Foxboro. Our home base for the long weekend was South Bay—a convenient, up-and-coming neighborhood just outside downtown Boston. While Foxboro, home to Gillette Stadium, was the main destination for the NCAA lacrosse semifinals and finals, we wanted the full Boston experience. And South Bay gave us just that.

We stayed in a modern hotel that was clean, comfortable, and surprisingly central. South Bay Shopping Center was within walking distance, making food, coffee, and quick necessities easy to grab. Parking was stress-free—an underrated blessing when you're planning to drive in and out of a stadium that holds nearly 70,000 people.

Game day meant a 45-minute drive down to Gillette Stadium. While some might groan at that, we actually enjoyed it. The drive was scenic, smooth, and an easy trade-off for spending our evenings in a walkable, historic city. Plus, it gave our son time to talk through his predictions for the matchups—and to critique mine. Each morning that we drove down to Foxboro we also picked a different small-town diner to stop in. Saturday, we dropped down to Norwood, MA and jumped inside The Sixties Diner. It was a blast to the past with the pictures on the wall, and shows like I Dream of Genie and The Flintstone's playing on each TV screen. We all had traditional diner style breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, & potatoes, and mine came with an awesome stack of French Toast as well.

South Bay gave us the best of both worlds: big-game energy and a classic Boston weekend. We had all the access to Fenway, the Seaport, and the Freedom Trail, while still being close enough to the action in Foxboro. If you're thinking about making the NCAA Lacrosse weekend during any of the year's its held in Boston, this setup is a winning game plan.