Katelyn WestSenior Vice President and Assistant General CounselNational Basketball Association<\/p>\n
Age:<\/b> 40 (turned 40 in June) <\/p>\n
Born: <\/b>New York<\/p>\n
Education:<\/b> Middlebury College, B.A., English; minors in math and Italian; University of Michigan Law School, J.D.<\/p>\n
Family: <\/b>Spouse, Aaron; children, Teddy (4 1\/2), Charlie (2)<\/p>\n
You apparently haven\u2019t lived until you\u2019ve lawyered a collective-bargaining agreement after midnight.<\/p>\n
Katelyn West, the NBA\u2019s assistant general counsel, has been part of two after-hours CBA deals she\u2019ll never forget, both of which are a large reason why she\u2019s a Forty Under 40 honoree.<\/p>\n
West has ascended at the league office due to her versatility and work ethic. Her initiation was the pandemic. Two years after she\u2019d joined the NBA, COVID-19 threw sports off course, and West became immersed in the Orlando bubble.<\/p>\n
She dealt with rules related to player compensation once the season, and became part of the NBA and players association working group that included Commissioner Adam Silver, NBPA Executive Director Michele Roberts and players such as Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had been there for only two years and got thrown into the midst of this incredibly complicated negotiation in the middle of a world crisis,\u201d West said.<\/p>\n
The 2023 CBA negotiation was her next lockdown, of sorts. She was involved in proposal development, supported the oversight function of the NBA Labor Relations Committee and took part in face-to-face bargaining talks. But on the evening of the March 31 deadline that year, no deal was done.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will forever, ever, ever, ever be a memory of mine,\u201d West said. \u201cAs folks around here say, \u2018Deadlines make deals.\u2019 And so on the 31st, we were in a conference room with the union, kind of meeting, caucusing, meeting, caucusing all day. We were getting pretty close to midnight and still didn\u2019t have everything figured out. We signed a one-hour extension at midnight to try and get it done by 1 o\u2019clock. Didn\u2019t happen. We signed another hour extension at 1 o\u2019clock to get it done by 2. Didn\u2019t happen. We signed another hour extension to get it done by 3, and by 3 we had the deal done.<\/p>\n
\u201cJeffrey Kessler has negotiated a ton of CBAs, and I remember him saying to me, like, \u2018Oh gosh, you\u2019ll forever remember your first CBA.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Her next marathon CBA was three Marches later, with the WNBA. She was in those eight consecutive days of sessions that lasted until dawn \u2014 away from her two young sons, but grinding to help the deal wind up.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was staying in the city at meetings till 5 in the morning, going home and trying to wake up to see my kids for an hour or two before school,\u201d she said. \u201cSo it was a wild ride.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Katelyn WestSenior Vice President and Assistant General CounselNational Basketball Association Age: 40 (turned 40 in June) Born: New…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":992823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[40],"tags":[398019,1260,4281,62,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-992822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-forty-under-40","tag-nba","tag-print","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117070745353286893","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=992822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/992823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=992822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=992822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=992822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}