I live up north, so most of my locations are similarly northerly; not sure if that’s good or bad for your situation.
Anyway, Wonko’s, up on 183 a little north of Anderson Mill, has a lot of weekly gaming in general and is where I first cut my teeth on Netrunner. I’ve had to bow out of the gaming scene for a while (becoming a new parent does that), but I’m sure they’ve got Netrunner gaming going on, either scheduled or more ad hoc. Ask the owner, Eric, about when Netrunner players tend to show up and he’ll clue you in even if it’s just three or four buddies who’ve informally agreed to meet and play on a specific day of the week.
The other avenue for local gaming for me has been through the Central Texas Boardgames Meetup group. Despite the broad sounding name, all the events I was aware of were in Austin. For example, there is a recurring weekly “bring games and play with whoever” meetup at the Silver Grill on Parmer on Thursday evenings. That, and meetups like it, would be a good focal point for local Netrunner enthusiasts to congregate at.
EDIT: And if you and your buddy find a couple of similarly interested gamers, it’d be super easy to create a new Central Texas Boardgames meetup event where you all and others get together somewhere and throw down. I know something similar happened for a while at Newk’s, a restaurant in the Arboretum. Once you’ve got a core group of 4 or so people, that might be enough for you to create a meetup event that could snowball into a larger, more established scene on the Austin meta. As you said, there were plenty of other players at Dragon’s Lair wanting something like that so if it doesn’t exist, you could very well make it exist.
