As I blogged last week, AMD and community have been synonymous throughout our 40-year history, in good times and bad. While we can’t afford every ‘grand gesture,’ we think it’s vital to stay connected to the communities where we work, live and play. Our long history of community involvement has been primarily focused on supporting math and science education, but also extends to activities that promote well-being and overall quality of life.

To that end, today we announced our community partnership with the Austin Aztex soccer team. The only professional soccer franchise in Austin, the Aztex are part of 11 teams that will play in the United Soccer League, with 15 home games scheduled at Austin’s Nelson field starting April 18. As you may already know, soccer (or ‘football’ as I call it) is the most popular sport in the world and the fastest growing sport in the U.S.  In fact, 35,000 kids and more than 10,000 adults play soccer in Central Texas alone.

This community partnership with Aztex represents a new, low-cost approach to a community involvement effort that, if successful, may be repeated at other AMD sites. With the help of AMD’s community partnership, the Aztex will support the Austin Independent School District (AISD) in their Health Zone Fitness program, which is designed to encourage students to understand the importance of health and fitness in their daily lives. So this also helps us extend our decades-long support for AISD, in which we’ve provided AMD processor-based computers to schools, mentored students with volunteer engineers and contributed to the tax base.

One more thing: I received a wonderful piece of mail the other day from what I believe is the world’s most valuable sports franchise. Impressively, it included a shirt with our logo on it. I thought you would like to see it ─ with apologies to City and Liverpool fans (for Americans: this would be like showing a Yankees shirt to a Red Sox fan).

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.