Employee No. 98 made a name for herself, didn’t she? But it’s time now; time for No. 98 to put herself first, time to eat some sandwiches, time to stop with all the startups and instead do a shutdown.
It’s been 30 years since we met her, since the NBA’s bossman, David Stern, crowned Val Ackerman “president” of the brand-spanking-new WNBA and kept the “commissioner” title for himself. But that’s essentially what she was back then, at the tender age of 36 — the face of a league who learned how to wear makeup because of it.
The stories she could tell. Like the one about the first WNBA logo, their female Jerry West. Or the one about the first slogan, and whether it should be “We Got Next” or “We’ve Got Next.” Or the one about the color of the ball, and whether it should be old-school orange or new-school orange and oatmeal. Or the one about Stern, who’d haul her into his office to go over disappointing ticket reports line by line.
“Like I’m supposed to explain why ticket sales are down in Charlotte,” she says.
But all that’s history now, with investors tripping over each other to pay $250 million or more for franchises. So, at last month’s WNBA All-Star Game in Chicago, Val Ackerman — NBA Employee No. 98 and WNBA Employee No. 1 — took center stage at the league’s 30-year reunion to give a talk for the ages.
There was so much she wanted to say, without making it feel like a goodbye. She wasn’t going to mention her days as commissioner of the Big East were numbered, that she was retiring as of Aug. 31. She wasn’t going to mention she was about to be a first-time grandma, that it had her thinking about her own grandparent, George Ackerman, who paved the way for her career. Instead, she put together a speech (the way she used to ghostwrite them for Stern) that was bound to make her audience think, make her audience nod and make her audience say, “You go, girl.”
She began it like this:
“I want to thank the WNBA and the ‘MNBA’ for hosting this event …”
Get it?
Driveway Hoops
Twentieth-century word alert: Tomboy.
That’s what Valerie Ackerman was, circa 1971, allowed to be the star of her driveway but nowhere else.
This is before Title IX, at a time the only middle school girls’ sports team in Pennington, N.J., was … cheerleading. Val tried out for that, practicing her sis-boom-bah in front of a mirror, and wound up getting cut. “Not that I wanted to be a cheerleader, but I was so humiliated,” Val says. “So I often tell people that, at heart, I’m a frustrated cheerleader.”
Val Ackerman’s uncle Steve (left) who played football at Yale, grandmother Marion, grandfather George and father Randy in the back. Courtesy of Val Ackerman
The other option was trying out for the boys’ basketball team she would’ve been cheerleading for, and, as it turns out, a lot of people thought that was the ticket. They’d seen her play in her front driveway, with and against her brother (one year younger), and not many were better shooters. Except her dad, Randy, of course.
Those Ackermans — every one of them was a baller, no matter the age, no matter the sport. Randy won 12 varsity letters at Trenton State (now College of New Jersey). His brother, Steve, played football at Yale. His other brother, John, was drafted by the Orioles. But the patriarch was Randy’s father, George Ackerman, who was once “Picture of the Week” in Life Magazine.
In some ways, that 1949 photograph tells you all you need to know about Val, her family and what would become her future. The photo is of George — then head football coach of a Trenton State team that hadn’t won in 11 years — giving his team a halftime pep talk while down 6-0. Over his head in the locker room is a sign that read: “IT’S NOT THE SIZE OF THE DOG IN THE FIGHT. IT’S THE SIZE OF FIGHT IN THE DOG.” They ended up winning, 7-6.
In ensuing years, Trenton State football turned dominant under Coach Ackerman, who famously roamed the sidelines in white buck shoes. Val heard all the stories — how Poppy, as she called him, coached her dad Randy (a lefty pitcher) on the school’s baseball and basketball team; how George became Trenton State’s athletic director, in charge of every campus sport. George essentially ran the place, and Val says, “I guess a little part of me picked up on my grandfather’s career, this idea that maybe someday that would be me.”
Val Ackerman’s grandfather George, the football, baseball and basketball coach at then-Trenton State Teachers College, meets with his team, circa early 1950s. Val’s father Randy is #6 on the upper right. Ackerman family
Poppy — who in his 60s became AD at Franklin High School in Somerset, N.J. — would often visit her house in Pennington, where Randy had dangled a floodlight onto the dogwood tree above the driveway basketball hoop. Perfect — now they could play after-dinner family games of H-O-R-S-E, which Randy usually won with trick underhand shots or bounce shots from the foul line. But it also meant Val could shoot day and night and night and day. That’s where people got the idea she should try out for the middle school boys’ team — because she and her brother, also named George, would terrorize the chumps in the neighborhood.
“I remember times where other kids were in our driveway, and Val and I would challenge them to a game of two-on-two,” George says. “They’d say, ‘Well, you can’t play with a girl.’ We would say, ‘Yeah, you’ll probably beat us, but we’ll play.’ Of course, we would absolutely clean their clock.”
That was a glimpse of her future: The only girl in the driveway years before she’d become the only girl in the boardroom. But back then, it hurt. She didn’t want to try out for the boys’ team — it felt too intimidating, a little too “radical” — so the driveway was her only outlet. She and her brother would whup those guys, and then her dad would saunter out to say, “Son, we’ve gotta go. You’ve got a game.” So her brother would pull on his CYO uniform and leave for Center City Trenton while Val sat at home thinking. …
The size of the fight in the dog.
Val Ackerman’s father Randy, who would challenge her to games of H-O-R-S-E in the family’s driveway, encouraged her to play basketball at a time when opportunities for girls to do so were extremely limited. Courtesy of Val Ackerman A Rare College Opportunity
And then Poppy was gone, too soon at age 66, the victim of a massive stroke and unable to witness the rise and revenge of now ninth-grade Val.
She had two things going for her that freshman year of 1973, besides being a tomboy. One was Title IX and the other was her father being AD at her high school. Maybe it’s because he’d seen Val shoot under the dogwood tree, or maybe it’s because his not-shy wife, Barbara, was into “women’s lib.” But Randy was about to forever change girls’ sports at Hopewell Valley Central High School.
It started with the uniforms. The first organized basketball game Val ever played — no, the driveway didn’t count — she was decked out in basically a tunic, complete with a pleated dress, suspenders and bloomers underneath. Their coach, Barb Skiba, told Randy, “We need better uniforms than this,” and, by Val’s sophomore year, he made sure they had sleeved shirts and shorts.
They also had a scorekeeper, who Val kept plenty busy. Val was a towheaded blur out there, her straight blond hair flopping every which way while she became the first 1,000-point scorer in school history, boys or girls, in the days of no 3-point shot. “I wish they counted assists at the time, because maybe I’d have that school record,” says teammate Judy Niederer. “Because it was, ‘Get the ball to Val, get the ball to Val.’”
By Val’s junior year, the Hopewell Valley girls were packing the crowds in, nearly taking the state title. And when Val toured Duke, North Carolina, Wake Forest and Virginia — in an era when women recruited schools more than schools recruited them — her mom lugged along Val’s basketball scrapbook to impress the coaches. “That was my mother; she would do things like that,” Val says. “It was a little bit annoying, but there was no stopping her.”
Only Duke and Virginia could even offer partial scholarships, and she chose UVA because its coaches were the only ones who’d actually seen her play. Assistant Debbie Ryan — soon promoted to head coach — was from the next town over, Titusville, N.J. And not only had Ryan attended Hopewell Valley, her younger sister, Karen, was Val’s teammate. Debbie didn’t need to see the scrapbook and closed the deal.
It was 1977 when Val arrived in Charlottesville, thinking Title IX had traveled south with her. But Title IX apparently missed the bus. Val and fellow freshman Dori Gamble split the only women’s scholarship, with Val saying, “The joke was I got tuition and Dori got room and board. So I got to go to class and she got to eat.”
When she played basketball at the University of Virginia in the 1970s, Val Ackerman split the only available scholarship with another player on the team. Courtesy of Val Ackerman
It wasn’t so funny once they saw the locker rooms. The way Val remembers it, the men’s team — the darlings of the campus, led by Jeff Lamp, Lee Raker and Marc Iavaroni — were “treated like gods.” They had a carpeted locker room, pregame meals and privacy. Val’s team had no carpet, no pregame meals (until senior year) and a community locker room shared with other women’s sports. Even worse, it had urinals.
“The girls would put flowers in those urinals,” Ryan says. “It was dark and damp and the mirrors were too high. Everything was wrong about it.”
Before practice, each player was handed a rolled-up towel containing unmarked shirts and shorts which, according to Val’s teammate Debby Stroman, were “hard as a brick because they hadn’t used a softener.” Occasionally, the roll would inadvertently include a jock strap.
“So they would come running out with the jock on over their shorts, which was hilarious,” Ryan says.
Val and Ryan — whose uncle was the athletic director, Gene Corrigan — said their piece, and conditions improved somewhat, with men’s coach Terry Holland patiently letting the women finish practice on the University Hall floor. Val was a four-year captain and felt responsible for them all. She was a brilliant student, a political and social thought major who aspired to practice law. She also made certain that Stroman — the first Black female athlete at the university — was embraced. And, on the court, she made sure that after every hard workout, the team chanted, “Ranked … ranked.”
That was the goal — get UVA in the top 25 — and during her senior year of 1981, the Cavs climbed to No. 15. But ask her for other memories of her college career and a pre-Christmas tournament that year at Temple flashes before her eyes.
Ryan had scheduled the game just for Val — so she could play close to home in front of family and friends — and, with three seconds left, UVA had a one-point lead and possession. During a timeout, Ryan asked Val, now a 1,000-point career scorer and the most dependable player on the team, to inbound the ball. Who else would it be? But, in a rare misfire, Val threw the pass away, leading to a stunning game-winning Temple layup.
Because it was Christmas break, she drove home with her parents feeling “crestfallen” — when suddenly her father Randy, son of George of Life Magazine fame, gave his own pep talk.
It was short, sweet and an outlier. According to Val, Randy was “not the kind of father who was very expressive. I think he was more repressed. That was sort of typical of men at that time, of that era.” But that made it even more poignant when he turned to his daughter and said simply, “The sun is going to come up tomorrow.”
Someday she’d use it in a speech.
Val Ackerman with her brother George, after he and his James Madison soccer team played her college Virginia. George Ackerman A Shot At The NBA
The sun came up all right, specifically 11 years later in Midtown Manhattan. There she was — after a one-year pro career in France, law school at UCLA and an associate position at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett — interviewing for a legal job at the NBA.
The league had never hired a female lawyer — it was as if Val was back in high school, wearing a tunic — but Randy was over the moon about the opportunity. He’d been a Bill Russell/Celtics fan forever and wished his daughter luck. It didn’t hurt that her mom, who’d worked in New Jersey Gov. Brendan Byrne’s administration, had Byrne himself write a letter of recommendation. As far as Val knows, Barbara didn’t send the basketball scrapbook.
Her hiring manager was Gary Bettman, then-NBA general counsel, and Val met extensively with him, NBA Executive Vice President Russ Granik and even the junior lawyer at the time, Joel Litvin. They were all in (“I thought we were lucky to find such a good candidate for what was at the time basically an entry-level legal position,” Bettman, the NHL commissioner, says now) but Stern still had to meet Val and sign off.
That was no picnic; not for a woman, a man or any living thing. Stern may very well have been the Bobby Knight of sports commissioners, in that he could be brilliant, charming, curt and rude over the course of the same day. Or hour. Or half hour. He’d champion you and hang up on you. Which is why Rick Welts, then-NBA vice president of marketing — hired and mentored himself by Stern — says, “It was bootcamp. I mean, I don’t think Stern’s management style would have flown in 2026. It was tough. Often felt like an interrogation more than a conversation.”
So that’s what Val, age 27 and wearing a pantsuit, was about to walk into, an NBA that Welts said stood for “Nothing But Attorneys … and was run by Stern, who considered himself the best attorney. So to start as a staff lawyer couldn’t be a more difficult assignment. And by the way, she was a woman.”
Before Val met him, Litvin warned her Stern always asks about a hire’s law review article. She panicked — she’d been on the UCLA moot court national team, not law review — but Litvin gave her a thumbs up and off she went. “I sit down, and I’m nervous,” Val says. “And David was a master interrupter. If you ever went in to talk to him, the over/under on when he would interrupt you to say something or ask something was usually about 30 seconds.”
Litvin was right: Stern peered at her résumé, asked her about moot court and she nailed her shot, the same way she’d nailed them under the dogwood tree. When Bettman formally offered her the job in November 1988, he asked her when she wanted to start.
“Tomorrow,” she said. She thought of her dad.
Family Setback
And then Randy was gone, too soon at age 54, the victim of an asthmatic attack and unable to witness the rise and revenge of Val and eventually a league called the WNBA.
She’d been at the league office about a month, initially writing cease-and-desist letters to shysters who were illegally selling non-sanctioned NBA T-shirts, and even witnessed her first office Christmas party, which was a sight to behold. Stern had everyone wear a hat with the order of their hire etched on the back. Val turned her cap around and saw: Employee No. 98.
But the news of her father’s death, just after he’d battled a chest cold over Christmas, had her asking for a leave of absence. Although Randy dealt with acute asthma his entire life, he’d been a picture of health who was still a high school teacher and AD, still playing tennis three days a week. “The shock of all shocks,” his son, George, says. For his funeral, the school system closed to pay homage, and the line to enter, in frigid temperatures, was out the door.
A despondent Val returned to the NBA, work being her escape, but she’d go home to her husband, Charlie Rappaport, a fellow attorney she’d met at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, and cry all night. “For two years,” she says.
So many sentimentalities crossed her mind, like the driveway basket. Randy had built it from scratch, rummaging up a flagpole — perhaps from school — and screwing on a backboard and basket. He strung up the floodlight just for her, way ahead of his time, because back in the early 1970s, a dad-and-daughter game of H-O-R-S-E wasn’t as common as it is now.
Through all her tears, though, Val realized her father and her grandfather, too — both inclusive ADs and principled leaders — had shown her how to thrive and speak up in a man’s world. It was about to come in handy.
Granik approached her circa 1989, saying he needed her help with FIBA. He told her Olympic eligibility rules were changing, that NBA players would play in the 1992 Olympics. Her first experience with a startup: the Dream Team.
She immersed herself in all of it: where the team would stay in Spain; the nuances of the insurance policies; what would happen if Magic, Michael and Larry, et al, got injured. She ingratiated herself to USA Basketball leadership, particularly Dave Gavitt of Big East fame. She was taught by her father and grandfather to revere the men who built the game, and Gavitt appreciated her. Stern did, too.
In 1990, the commissioner created a position just for her: special assistant to him. “I think I offered my condolences,” Welts says, laughing. “If you were living in the moment, I can’t imagine a tougher job. But also with a vote of confidence that he would’ve put her in that role.”
She opened his mail in an era before email. She’d listen in on his calls; sit in on his meetings. She says he’d kick her out of his office, hang up on her and leave Post-its on her phone saying, “8 a.m. came by, you weren’t here.” She says his mantra was, “Micromanagement is underrated.” She’s sure it was partly “for show,” partly “just to kick you in the butt a little bit.” But she also believes the job was the opportunity of a lifetime, “just a master class in learning how to be a commissioner.” She was eternally grateful.
She traveled with the Dream Team amidst it all, while pregnant with her first child, Emily. And, after a pre-Olympics practice day in La Jolla, Calif., Michael and Magic said, “Follow us,” and sneaked her off the team bus to avoid a ridiculous crowd. It was validation. She was one of the guys.
While in Barcelona, she was the rare NBA exec to sneak and watch the U.S. women play, which didn’t go well. The team, led by Cynthia Cooper and Teresa Edwards, had been upset by the Soviets, and Val, aghast, personally went to see them take the bronze. Val may have been in a man’s world, may have been one of the guys. But, just like she never tried out for the middle school boys’ team, she still wanted to be one of the girls.
Female Dream Team
Little did she know, Stern was grooming her for it all.
He had earlier begun asking her to write his speeches, which was a compliment, a sign of trust and a crapshoot — because there was no guarantee he’d use them. “Oh my gosh, he was the worst deliverer of speeches ever,” Welts says. “I can’t tell you how many times we were off-stage at some event, and he’ll look at you five minutes before he goes on and says, ‘What should I say today?’ And then he will go out and completely charm.”
But Val wrote them, anyway — always pouring her heart and soul into them — even though she remembers Stern sometimes “tossing them in a garbage can as he was walking up the steps to the stage.” She hardly took it personally because he was better winging it anyway, “the envy of all of us.”
The point is, she had his ear, and after the ’92 women’s Olympics debacle and then another loss at the ’94 women’s World Championships, she had a suggestion: a female Dream Team.
No one knew it then, but, big picture, it might be the most transcendent moment in women’s sports. A dozen ladies — Dawn Staley, Jennifer Azzi, Lisa Leslie, Rebecca Lobo, Sheryl Swoopes, to name five — would drop everything and spend a year traveling, scrimmaging and playing together ahead of the 1996 Olympics. The NBA would foot the bill, and on the exact 1994 day that USA Basketball formally agreed to the extended tour, Val gave birth to her second child, Sally.
Granik and Welts passed along the good news while she was lying in a hospital bed, and her maternity leave lasted all of about six weeks. She wasn’t missing this.
When she delivered Emily in ’92, Val believes Stern and Co. assumed she’d resign to be a stay-at-home mom. But if they didn’t know Val then, they knew her now. She predicted to Stern, Granik, Welts and Stern’s new special assistant, Adam Silver (“Pretty good job that kid Adam Silver inherited,” Welts says), that a female Dream Team could ignite a women’s basketball revolution. And when the team went 52-0 on the tour, jogged with President Clinton and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated ahead of the Olympics, Stern’s wheels started turning.
In April 1996, even before the U.S. women won gold in Atlanta, the commissioner convinced the league’s board of governors to ride the wave of the national team and approve the concept of a WNBA. And probably because he could hang up on her, bellyache at her and crumple up her speeches — and she still kept her wits about her — Stern wanted Val to run the league. Maybe it was all a test.
He named her president, of course, not commissioner. Because remember: Micromanagement is underrated.
Val Ackerman returned to work after having daughter Sally and soon found herself named by NBA Commissioner David Stern to oversee the birth of the WNBA. Courtesy of Val Ackerman Launching The W
Now this was a startup! Val, who once wore bloomers to play basketball, got to decide whether the uniforms would be baggy like the Fab Five (yes) and V-neck (yes, again). The basketball would be one inch smaller in circumference than the men’s ball (to stay consistent with the women’s college game), and, in collaboration with NBC’s Dick Ebersol, they trialed basketballs of various colors at Madison Square Garden with cameras running. Orange and oatmeal won, made for TV.
The slogan “We Got Next” beat out “We’ve Got Next,” because that’s how the world spoke on the playground. But the most raw debate was over the logo, which, despite popular belief, was not a silhouette of Jennifer Azzi. The discussions started with the shape of the hair. Should it have a ponytail? Should it be a white girl? A Black girl? From all appearances, the choice was a hybrid. Should there be breasts? Hips? Muscles? The answer was all of the above. “Had to make her athletic,” said Renee Brown, then Senior Vice President & Chief of Basketball Operations and Player Relations.
Val spread the word all over the country and decided she needed a personal shopper so she would look the part. “My shopper turned me on to a makeup person, stuff I never had to worry about before,” she says. “I’m a doer, a grinder, I chop wood. But here I was, thrust right into the limelight.”
The first year, the league averaged about 10,000 fans, and when Stern witnessed the Liberty’s debut sellout at MSG, Val saw him stare into the rafters and grin. It made her year. He even let her use his league-chartered plane — usually reserved for him — to fly to the WNBA Finals in Houston, and the owners all applauded Val at that fall’s BOG meeting.
As the first president of the WNBA, Val Ackerman posed with the eight original team owners. Courtesy of Val Ackerman
But the NBA got too ambitious, expanding the W too fast, changing the second-year slogan to “We Got Game” when “We Got Next” resonated more. “I just remember she was holding the weight of the world on her shoulders trying to keep this league up,” said Kristin Bernert, then an executive for the Detroit Shock.
As attendance nosedived and teams moved and/or disbanded, friends say Val wore it. She wasn’t as blunt with colleagues as Stern was (“We had a horrific crowd one night, and she’d just say, ‘This isn’t what it’s going to be like moving forward, right?’” Bernert says) but could be just as “relentless.” She did it the Val Way, her grandfather’s way. The fight in the dog. But the stress would cave anyone in, and Kelly Krauskopf, then the W’s first director of basketball ops, says, “I’d always joke with her, ‘You’re so serious all the time. Do you ever laugh? You ever just smiling?’ We would all sort of be, ‘How are we going to get Val to laugh today or smile today?’”
Everyone noticed it. Dee Kantner, the league’s director of referee development, says, “I would hug her and say, ‘Have you eaten lately?’ Because she always looked too thin. I was like, ‘Val, you’re wearing yourself out, you need a sandwich.’ I’d always greet her with, ‘You need a sandwich.’”
By 2005, she’d done all she could, fortunate perhaps the W was still breathing. Granik, for one, says, “It was never predestined that the league would survive at all,” and Val resigned in 2005 with a legacy of … well, here’s the best story:
She was with her daughters, then 11 and 13, when one of them asked, “Mom, what’s a tomboy?”
That said it all. Perhaps because of Val and the W — perhaps because it was now normal for girls to hoop — the word “tomboy” hadn’t quite made it to the 21st century.
The original WNBA logo WNBA Reviving The Big East
She kept files of Stern speeches in a desk, but it was time to write her own now — and deliver them, too.
She became president of USA Basketball, then the first American woman on FIBA’s Central Board. She wrote a prescient 2013 white paper on women’s intercollegiate athletics and later became a scrupulous teacher in the sports management program at Columbia. One day, she and the longtime head of CBS Sports, Neal Pilson, were co-teaching a grad school sports leadership class, and they used the breakup of the Big East as a case study. Now Pilson’s wheels started turning.
Pilson had ties to the conference and recommended Val as commissioner. Teetering from the exodus of its football schools and rebranded as the convoluted American Athletic Conference, league patriarch and Georgetown President Jack DeGioia took charge. He was the conscience of the “Catholic Seven,” who all wanted to reprise the Big East name, become basketball-centric again, move their offices to New York City and retain MSG as their exclusive tournament home. Val, with DeGioia’s blessing, would lead them.
“We were looking for somebody that could make us an equal partner with the football schools in the future of collegiate basketball — and she sold us on that,” says Father Brian Shanley, the St. John’s president.
Another startup! Though the conference had no website, no email, no benefits plan, no checking account, no physical address and no staff, Val says her new job was basically “fighting for the basketball schools.” It was so in her DNA. Before hiring her, the league had called Bettman as a character reference, and he vouched for Val, saying, “I didn’t think they could hire anybody better — particularly for a conference that was more basketball-focused than anything else.’’
She also bumped into Granik and who else but Stern at a Hall of Fame event in Springfield – fresh off her Big East hire, finally a commissioner — with Granik joking to their former micromanager, “I guess she did pretty well – we’re proud of you Val.” Stern’s reaction? “David just kind of laughed, but I think it was clear,’’ Granik says.
But she was also the only woman in the room again, the enormous room of a college sports league. Her brother was asked by an acquaintance one day what Val was up to, and George answered, “Commissioner of the Big East.”
“Women’s commissioner?”
“No, whole conference,” he said.
Face it; now she was on the boys’ team, girls’ team, the entire shebang. Her coups were bringing back charter member UConn; using her connections to lock in MSG; landing a crucial 12-year, $500 million deal with Fox Sports; ensuring every women’s hoops game was streamed on Peacock or ESPN+; extending the deal with Fox through 2031; and relocating Big East offices to the rarified Empire State Building.
“I give her so much credit — in a landscape dominated by, let’s be real, males, Val had as sharp elbows as anybody in those rooms,” says Georgetown AD Lee Reed.
“Oh, I’ve seen Val in rooms being mansplained at times, and it makes me crazy,” says Father Shanley. “And it just rolls right over her. … the challenge for the Big East has long been, ‘How do we take our place at the table with schools that mainly generate athletic revenue from football?’ And I think Val has kept us at the table with the big boys. … That’s been a tough battle, but she’s been tenacious.”
Most of all, maybe, she gave the Big East its soul back. She had known Gavitt, the conference’s founder, from Dream Team days, and the new weight on her shoulder was preserving Gavitt’s legacy and Gavitt’s conference. Remember: She’d been taught under the dogwood tree by Poppy and Randy to honor the men and women before her. So she insisted, along with Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany, that the Big Ten-Big East challenge be named The Gavitt Games. At all costs.
“They could have called it anything,” says Dan Gavitt, Dave’s son and the NCAA’s SVP of basketball. “So that was probably as touching a moment as I can remember during her tenure.”
Meanwhile, DeGioia — for her first decade as commissioner — became her invaluable confidant, always a phone call away. But then in June 2024, he suffered and survived a massive stroke that had Val aching. Aching because it was so sudden, so much like Poppy and Randy. Would DeGioia be gone too soon?
Val Ackerman led the rebirth of the Big East Conference with its original “Catholic Seven” members. Big East Conference
She visited DeGioia at his home in Washington, honored him in league meetings and finally faced her own mortality. She turned 66 in November 2025, the same age Poppy had been when he died, and she made her mind up to retire this August before she hits 67.
“This sounds a little morbid,” she says. “But my dad died at 54, my grandfather died at 66, and … we never know what fate has in store for us. I don’t know; maybe I’ll be like my mom and live till 88. But I don’t know how much time I have left. I’m not trying to make this sad.”
But this summer cheered her up, of course, like it always does: WNBA season. She decided to help arrange the 30th reunion during Chicago’s All-Star Weekend, where she could finally stand up and say what she’s always wanted to say about her life’s work at the W.
She wrote her speech on her jet from New York (one more speech for old time’s sake?) determined to honor Stern, who had died on New Year’s Day 2020. The audience of more than 100 — including Silver and WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert — was riveted when she brought Stern’s name up out of nowhere, when she said, “I’m sorry beyond words that David isn’t here to witness this gathering, as I don’t believe anybody would have been prouder to see how far the women’s game and this league have come in the past three decades than him.”
Val then got to the heart of the matter, to the elephant in the room: the divisiveness that has recently rocked the W. Employee No. 98 simply looked out at her WNBA and MNBA audience and put it like this:
“The league was never meant to pit anybody against anybody else, except on the basketball court. It was never supposed to be about gay versus straight, or black versus white, or men against women, or everybody against the officials. The opportunity was — and I believe still is — about the joys that only a league like the WNBA can deliver …
“Think about it: Over the past 30 years, the league has progressed from infancy, to toddlerhood, to the teenage years and now adulthood, right before our very eyes. Being part of the journey has been — or was — the professional honor of a lifetime for all of us who are here tonight, and I feel very sure that the best is still to come.”
The Val way of saying: The sun will come up tomorrow.
The Val Ackerman File
Born: Nov. 7, 1959, Lakewood Township, N.J.
Education: University of Virginia, B.A., political and social thought (1981), basketball, two-time Academic All-American; UCLA, law degree (1985)
Family: Husband, Charlie Rappaport; two daughters, Emily and Sally
Boards: NCAA Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee, member; Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, board of directors; Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, lifetime trustee
1981: Union Cosnoise Sportive Basket, player in France
1985-87: Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, corporate and banking associate
1988: NBA, staff attorney
1989: USA Basketball, board of directors
1990: NBA, special assistant to the commissioner; later named vice president of business affairs
1992: USAB organizational liaison at the 1992 Olympics; later has same role for 1994 World Championships and 1996 Olympics
1996: WNBA, president (league’s first); guided the league’s launch the following year
1999: College Sports Information Directors of America Academic All-America Hall of Fame, inductee
2002: Atlantic Coast Conference 50th Anniversary Women’s Basketball Team
2005: USA Basketball, president
2005: Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, member
2005: Women’s Basketball Coaches Association President’s Citation
2006: U.S. representative for men’s and women’s basketball on the Central Board of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA); named to a second term in 2010
2008: John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
2008-13: NCAA, consultant
2012: National Consortium for Academics and Sports Hall of Fame (now called Institute for Sport & Social Justice)
2013: Named Big East commissioner
2013: USA Basketball’s Edward S. Steitz Award for contributions to international basketball
2013: Big East signs 12-year deal with Fox Sports worth $500 million
2014: NCAA Men’s Basketball Oversight Committee, member
2014: Led the relocation of the Big East’s headquarters from Providence, R.I., to its current site in New York City
2014: Launch of the Big East Digital Network (BEDN)
2016: Women’s Sports Foundation’s Billie Jean King Contribution Award
2017: U.S. Soccer Federation, at-large board member
2018: Big East and Madison Square Garden sign agreement to keep the Garden as the home of the Big East men’s basketball tournament through 2028
2019: Leads negotiations that result in the University of Connecticut’s return to the Big East, effective the following year
2019: Co-chair of the NCAA Federal and State Legislation Working Group
2021: Naismith Memorial Basketball of Fame, inductee
2023: Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, inductee
2024: Big East enters into a successor media rights agreement through 2031 on multiple Fox Sports, NBC/Peacock and TNT Sports platforms
2024: Conference and MSG extend venue agreement, keeping the Garden as the home of the Big East men’s tournament through 2032
2024: Sports Lawyers Association Michael Weiner Award of Excellence
2025: Conference enters six-year agreement with ESPN to provide broad coverage of additional Big East competitions on the ESPN+ platform
2025: Big East and Playfly Sports extend multimedia rights partnership through 2031
2026: Big East announces a three-year extension with Mohegan Sun Arena to serve as host of the women’s basketball tournament
2026: Announces planned retirement as Big East commissioner, effective Aug. 31
— Compiled by Emma Grace Patrick