Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is making his rounds around the United States. At the end of February he visited Nick Saban and the Alabama football team, today he stopped by Tobacco Road to chat with the Duke and UNC basketball teams. Zuckerberg talked about his visit and shared some photos on his Facebook page.
I spent today visiting Duke and the University of North Carolina doing some research for my NCAA bracket. I’m feeling pretty good about this one.
In all seriousness, I’m interested in how sports form the basis for communities. We all need to be part of something bigger than ourselves — whether that’s a team or a community that roots for a team.
Thanks to Coach K and Coach Williams for teaching me how you set values for your organizations — from making sure everyone feels ownership of the team to making sure the team feels like a family. As Coach K said, the players each “need to have the courage to lead at the moment leadership is needed.”
Also, thanks to the student athletes who shared with me their experiences of how important trust and communication between the players is. They each gave examples of how they made mistakes and needed to work hard at not losing confidence in themselves and their teammates so they could keep performing at peak levels in competitive situations. It reminded me of how important trust and teamwork is at Facebook.
A special thanks to the UNC team for not laughing too hard at what was probably the worst basketball ever played on their court. I’d say my basketball is about as good as their coding, but at least one of the players I met is a computer science major so I don’t even have that to fall back on.
For those who don’t follow the NCAA closely, UNC is the #1 seed in their region and Duke is #2 in theirs.
Good luck in the tournament to everyone I met today!