The Lunch-bunch

A decades-long basketball tradition brings CMU staff, faculty and students onto the court. Zack Rubinstein and Sean McGowan hurriedly changed out of work clothes into T-shirts, shorts and basketball shoes in the locker room adjacent to Wiegand Gym. Earlier that morning, their Carnegie Mellon University colleague Kareem Demian started an email chain on a distribution list affectionately called the "Lunch-bunch" with a simple message: Let's do this. Rubinstein and McGowan tried each week to arrange their Tuesday and Friday schedules around a long-running lunchtime basketball game held in the Cohon University Center's basketball court. They worked as a steady stream of one-word replies to Demian's message filled their inbox. "In," each one read, as colleagues across the university signaled they would show up at noon for the game. Rubinstein, a principal project scientist at CMU's Robotics Institute , and McGowan, an assistant director of employer relations, might otherwise never have interacted at a university that employs nearly 7,000 people.