Bleed Blue, Live Green: Duke Students rock Focus the Nation and ESPN

If you know me at all, you know I’m a Carolina basketball fanatic and you know it’s a little painful for me to write about a job well done by Duke basketball fans.

Rivalries run deep here on Tobacco Road and it’s not everyday that the Cameron Crazies (the nickname for Duke students who go to extremes to cheer for their men’s basketball team in Cameron Indoor Stadium) don anything other than their usual dark blue paint. But for the NC State game on January 31st, the Focus the Nation team at Duke (rockstar Kelsey Shaw and company) convinced fans to wear green t-shirts that read “Bleed Blue, Live Green” and cheer for solutions to climate change along with their (overrated) team.

The shirts were not the only green aspect of the game. Students and other fans were asked to sign the Duke Sustainability Pledge, a commitment to researching and implementing climate friendly lifestyle changes. Furthermore, the University Athletic Department purchased carbon offsets equivalent to the electricity, steam and transportation consumed by the game, working in partnership with the renewable-energy company NativeEnergy.

Duke’s greening of the basketball game could not have happened without the work of STAR Sports for Environmental Change. Star Sports is an amazingly innovative organization helping teams, athletes, and sporting events to use the power of global sports and its powerful media reach to anchor community efforts to reduce carbon emissions by 25% or more in 3 years. (Check out the sweet commercial about sustainability efforts at Alabama and Colorado at Boulder that they ran during the Independence Bowl last fall)

So for the first time in my life, I cheered for Duke (but then damned them all to hell as usual). Go Heels!