#ChampionDurham

My six-year tenure on the Durham Sports Commission just ended. The “Commissioners” gathered for a Bulls game on June 15th...and I said farewell.

While serving on the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce Board, I was among the founders back in 2015-16. Despite the preeminence of Duke athletics, NCCU and the Bulls, we felt strongly that Durham needed to do more to attract and promote sporting events. 

They are an economic engine for our hotels, restaurants, shopping and other attractions. The Sports Commission’s job is to pump fuel into that engine. We also promote youth sports in Durham and encourage local event organizers. The Commission is a funder, marketer and cheer leader.

The pandemic was a setback, but this year the DSC is on pace to support 19 events with an economic impact of $13 million.

Of course, this is sports, so there’s competition aplenty. Raleigh/Wake County has a prepared meals tax that funds sports facilities. The Town of Cary has a parks and rec system designed to host events. To the west, Greensboro has a world class aquatics center. To the east, Rocky Mount has an impressive baseball/softball/soccer facility and an events center with 8 basketball courts and auditorium seating for 4,000. 

What could Durham build? And where? We need a facility for both community recreation and a best-in-class sports center to host national tournaments. The DSC is crafting that vision with the very capable leadership of Executive Director Marcus Manning and our new Chairwoman Ingrid Wicker McCree.

Sports-related travel and tourism is a gigantic $40 billion pie in the US. Durham wants a bigger slice of that pie!

Durham: Smartest Place on the Planet

The Durham Chamber held it's annual meeting last Thursday, and it was a celebration of the community's intellectual capital. I was just glad to be in the Sheraton Imperial ballroom with the really smart people.

The Chamber has established a Bull City Hall of Fame with these three inaugural inductees: Mary-Dell Chilton, a plant biotechnology pioneer at Syngenta in RTP and recipient of the 2013 World Food Prize; Duke's Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, a 2012 recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry; and Blake Wilson, co-director of the Duke Hearing Center who received the 2013 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. He's a leader in cochlear implant research. International acclaim for world-class scientists!

As part of the Research Triangle - what I like to say is the “smartest place on the planet" - we compete regularly and successfully with the likes of Nashville, Boston, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area...for companies, jobs and talent. 

And that means we don’t have to defend Durham, or protect it from the slights of others. Rather, we need to promote it, to take pride in what we have, and be passionate about Durham as the great place to live, work, learn, and play. I know you join me in that.

Michael Schoenfeld
Outgoing Chair of the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce
Vice President for Public Affairs & Government Relations
Duke University

the arts AND sports

The arts and sports profoundly influence a community’s quality of life. It’s not an either-or proposition. We need museums, theaters and sports venues. (I’m particularly fond of the culinary arts!) The arts AND sports work TOGETHER. 

I was looking at some attendance figures last week that make it perfectly clear. West Side Story had a very successful run at the Durham Performing Arts Center June 5th – 10th drawing a total of 19,000 patrons. The Bulls - playing next door (literally!) - were at home during that time frame. Over the same six-day period we drew 34,000 fans. 

That goes a long way toward explaining downtown Durham’s renaissance - the arts and sports working side-by-side. 

For a couple of decades Durham has been playing defense, but we’re on offense now! That’s the gist of recent remarks from Mike Schoenfeld. He’s chair of the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce and VP of Public Affairs at Duke University. Under Mike’s leadership, the Chamber is looking at arts and sports as a new economic development tool. We market higher education, our highly educated workforce and the creative class of designers, software developers and entrepreneurs. Our arts organizations and sports teams should be on the list, too. 

Americans for the Arts released a study on Monday addressing the arts’ local economic impact. In Durham County, expenditures by nonprofits and their audiences (in 2010) totaled $125.5 million. Now, it’s on my list to aggregate the value of Duke and NCCU sports, the Bulls, USA Baseball and other amateur sporting events in Durham. 

Coach K & the Family K

Last week's annual meeting of the Durham Chamber of Commerce was an astonishing event.

There was a record-setting crowd of 800 at the Sheraton Imperial. That's not the big news.

The Chamber's economic development work led to 52 companies locating or expanding in Durham last year - creating 2,316 new jobs. That's not the big news.

What was so amazing? Duke's Coach K was the speaker, and he did NOT discuss basketball!

Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski - and their family - received the Chamber's Civic Honor Award. That was unprecedented, too.

Instead of hoops, the Ks talked about their family's 32 years in Durham, and we received a pep talk on the Bull City.

As Mickie put it: We raised our children in Durham, and they are raising their children in Durham. Durham is our home. As they say at Cameron "This is our house!"

The Herald-Sun covered the K-fam's award and the Durham Chamber's annual meeting; click here for the story.

Of course, Coach K is a basketball legend, but the Emily Krzyzewski Center is his family's enduring legacy in downtown Durham.

Pix from Scott Faber Photography.

POTUS Visits Durham

President Obama will visit Durham Monday. He's touring Cree, a home-grown company with a global market for its LED lighting.

The President will be accompanied by his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. These rock stars of American business will be meeting Monday, too.

There’s a reception Sunday evening at the American Tobacco campus and White House staffers are coming to the 5pm Bulls game.

I’m pleased the visitors will get a taste of downtown Durham. The symbolism is significant: tobacco to tech and edu...3,000 people ("the creative class") now working in what was a million square feet of abandoned cigarette factory. Of course, baseball improved the neighborhood, too.


Donning my Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce hat, I have revisited the notes from our May 19th Economic Development Summit in RTP.

We listened to three panel discussions with start-ups, mature tech firms and big manufacturers. The common thread was our talent pool. Certainly, incentives, taxes and lifestyle are important, but “workforce” is our strong suit.

Two entrepreneurs “livin’ the dream” on the coast (Savannah GA and Beaufort SC) relocated to Durham for access to the Bull City's tech talent.

From my conference notes:

• We have a wealth of human capital in tech and bio-pharma.
• The confluence of higher education in the Triangle creates a “crossroads for interdisciplinary talent.”
• Our community college system has effectively re-skilled the workforce from tobacco/textiles to tech.

And there is something special about Tar Heel character: the work ethic of the workforce was cited as an added benefit to doing business here.

These intangibles do matter. Longtime GSK leader (now of Hatteras Venture Partners) Bob Ingram talked about Durham’s warmth, energy and excitement.

I’m confident the visiting CEOs will make note of this on Monday!

A Gaping Achievement Gap

My last post was on a Broadway show. Next up: a documentary. (It is the off-season after all.)


The Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce held a screening of Waiting for Superman on Monday. Even with that unruffled, earnest documentary style, it’s a scathing review of American public education in general and teachers’ unions in particular.

The gist of the film (according the me): Public education is broken. It hasn’t functioned effectively since the 1970’s. Funding per pupil has more than doubled while outcomes have flat-lined. The documentary stresses the importance of effective teachers, yet the system engenders mediocrity rather than merit. Poverty need not be an impediment. Children will learn in any school staffed with great teachers. [Click here for Wiki's take on the movie.]

The US Chamber of Commerce is using the film to demand accountability and innovation. Excerpts from an op-ed column in Monday’s Herald-Sun:

The facts are alarming. Among developed countries, the United States ranks 21st out of 30 in science literacy and 25th out of 30 in mathematics literacy. The achievement gap between low-income and minority students and their peers is gaping. And an astonishing 1.2 million students - about six times the population of the city of Durham - fail to graduate from high school each year.

...North Carolina has significant work to do to better prepare all of its students for success in college and the workplace. The National Council on Teacher Quality gave North Carolina a “D+” for its state teacher policies, noting that policies for delivering well-prepared teachers and removing ineffective teachers were especially bad.

...while leaders in North Carolina have been committed to improving student performance in reading and math, achievement is still too low. The National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 43 percent of fourth grade students and 36 percent of eighth grade students were proficient in math. There is also a wide achievement gap, with minority students underperforming white students by nearly 30 points on fourth and eighth grade reading and math tests.

Read the entire piece; click here. It was penned by Durham native Bill Shore, chairman of the US Chamber’s Institute for a Competitive Workforce and director of community partnerships for GlaxoSmithKline, and Casey Steinbacher, President/CEO of the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce.

Waiting for Superman is currently showing at Galaxy Cinema in Cary.