Adidas Sneakers to Meta Headsets
In this role, Walker manages Meta’s relationship with NBA and WNBA athletes while strategizing how the company engages with basketball holistically. According to Walker, Meta has identified basketball as a high priority because of its young, highly-engaged and international fanbase.
“There’s so much that lives at the intersection of sports and tech,” said Walker. “Basketball embodies a lot of things tech wishes it had — it’s innately cool, it’s part of culture, it intersects with music and fashion and the star players are massive celebrities. Tech lacks some of that cool and relevance, and I always thought it would be really exciting if I could be one of the people that contributed to bridging that gap.”
Key to Meta’s overall vision of the future is the implementation of the metaverse — a virtual reality world accessible via VR headsets à la Ready Player One. The company announced its commitment to this vision in October 2021 by changing its name from Facebook and making a $10 billion investment in designing its own metaverse.
Walker’s goal is to figure out how basketball fits into that future, believing the metaverse’s unique, immersive qualities have the potential to make it a revolutionary training device, recruitment tool and platform for athletes and fans to connect. Additionally, he is excited to explore the metaverse’s ability to create equitable spaces for those in marginalized groups.
Walker’s entire career could be considered a warmup to being Meta’s basketball community representative. Before his current position, he liaised with athletes as head of sports marketing for grassroots basketball in North America for Adidas. More fittingly, he spent time in the players’ shoes as one of them. In 2008, he came to UAA to play for the Seawolves men’s basketball team before graduating and moving to Bonn, Germany, to play professionally.
Unfortunately, Walker’s time as a basketball player was cut short after experiencing an injury. But as a silver lining, he used the connections he made as an athlete — and his UAA degree — to successfully pivot, becoming a coach and eventually a player manager before finding his way to Adidas.
“Having a degree gave me the confidence to enter the workforce in a way I probably wouldn’t have had if I didn’t have one,” said Walker. “And sociology gave me a better understanding of people and communities — where they come from, how that could shape them and what value that has in their life. Being empathetic to and curious about different journeys and groups has served me really well in terms of the interpersonal relationship aspects of my career.”
Read more about Brandon Walker’s previous position at Adidas in Green & Gold News.