As Val Ackerman retires from Big East, she deserves thanks for taking on tough challenges

Sports executives rarely come out ahead, at least on the ledger of public perception. Most often, they are blamed for things they can’t control, and their successes are taken for granted. Val Ackerman is no different.

But as she ends her 13-year run as Big East commissioner, indeed an historic career of 38 years as a sports exec, she is due to take some bows, receive a thank you for taking on tough tasks and thankless jobs and getting it right far more often than not. “I’ve worked a good shift,” Ackerman told reporters, on a Zoom call Tuesday.

Ackerman worked two good shifts, actually, and beat the odds twice. She was instrumental as first head of the WNBA, a venture that had potential, but also had high probability of failure and insolvency when she took on the assignment in 1996. She left a stable league upon which her successors have built an increasingly lucrative enterprise.

Then in 2013, she was plucked from the pros to take on an even dicier enterprise, a new Big East, a basketball-centric conference in a college landscape dominated by football schools and power conferences. With four national champions and six Final Four appearances, it has more than held its own.

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“Val guided the Big East through the most transformative era in the history of college sports,” UConn AD David Benedict said, “and her steady leadership was instrumental in repositioning the conference as one of the premier leagues in the country. A pioneer in women’s basketball and a tireless advocate for the game, Val’s impact extends far beyond the sidelines and front offices she has worked in throughout her distinguished career.”

And she did all this, mind you, while raising a family.

“After I retired (as a player), I realized she was doing all this while having very young children at home,” said UConn’s Rebecca Lobo, Naismith Hall of Famer and one of the WNBA’s original players. “One of her kids was an infant at the time the WNBA was in its infancy. And anyone who has walked that line as a working mom understands the challenges of that. So I have an even higher appreciation for what Val was able to do in the early years of the NBA.”

Ackerman, who played basketball at Virginia before she was hired by the NBA in 1988,  broke down barriers for women in sports by simply showing up and doing a good job, without necessarily recognizing the barriers, until those barriers eventually vanished. She accomplished hard things by doing them, without complaining about the degree of difficulty.

“There had been so many (women’s basketball) leagues that folded,” Lobo said. “There needed to be a belief that this one was going to be different, and she helped instill that, whether it was with owners or sponsors, the players felt like we were all in this together.”

Ackerman had David Stern and the NBA infrastructure behind her. “We had to introduce women’s basketball to the world in a whole new way,” she said, “because that had not worked in prior endeavors.”

The original concept was for teams to be owned by NBA counterparts in those markets. By the time Ackerman left in 2005, The W had adapted and survived in part by pivoting away from that and finding success with franchises like the Connecticut Sun (2003). Now, for better or worse, it’s pivoting back, but with the new collective bargaining agreement and exponentially rising TV revenue and salaries, “this is the dream we all had,” Ackerman said.

The original Big East was the product of Dave Gavitt’s vision. To that vision, the conference wisely added football in an effort to keep long-time members, but this effort failed and the league imploded. The seven basketball schools, the Catholic schools, broke up to form their own league and — despite what you still see on social media occasionally — did not want UConn, or the football schools to come with them.

The new league acquired the name and rebranded under Ackerman, keeping its tournament in Madison Square Garden, keeping the focus on basketball, and with some help from Jay Wright and Villanova, it took hold.

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“Here we were relaunching a brand that many people had a very strong opinion about,” Ackerman said. “People knew what the Big East was, but the forces of history had sent it off in a different direction, The charge for us was to bring that back. The challenge for me, I didn’t have any infrastructure, the old infrastructure was back with the American (Athletic Conference), so it was actually a harder assignment (than the WNBA), we had to rebuild and it was very much a startup.”

The most fruitful of Ackerman’s decisions was to keep the idea of getting UConn into the new league even when several efforts went nowhere. In 2018, Benedict and UConn’s hierarchy came to terms with Ackerman and the Big East presidents.

“We knew implicitly what they would bring in terms of history and geography and what they would bring in basketball, men and women,” Ackerman said. “There were some questions about how they’d fit in the new Big East, joining a league with 10 private schools, nine Catholic schools. They’ve not only been successful outwardly, but they’ve been great partners in the truest sense of the word. Adding back UConn was a major move for us, one that has paid dividends all the way around and I hope that the UConn leadership would agree it has been a win-win.”

During the arc of her career and due to her efforts, women’s sports at the college and pro level are at higher places than before, and executive positions for women are a reality. She expressed the hope, “we will not go backwards.”

Ackerman did it quietly, including her retirement. Under the radar, she signed a shorter contract, set to end as she turned 66, and she kept her intentions private until after the basketball season. As we said at the top, commissioners get more blame than credit. There are those, with good reason, who believe the Big East needs to expand to keep up, but a commissioner cannot wave a wand and make that happen, as Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark has learned in his quest to add UConn. She has also been criticized for not raising her voice on Selection Sundays, as if a conference commissioner could rant and rave more teams in the Field of 68.

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This comes with the territory for a sports executive. From the vantage point of Connecticut, Ackerman has done the right things, and it was rather fortunate for UConn and Sun fans she was there when she was. She has broken barriers, done difficult things, worked a couple of “good shifts.” Now Ackerman’s family no longer has to share her with these jobs. The Big East will cast a wide net to find someone with a vision, and Ackerman-level resourcefulness and industriousness by next fall.

“She’s been comfortable walking into those rooms and being a leader even if she might present differently than all the men who are there,” Lobo said. “A woman raising a family to be comfortable in those rooms, that’s a really, really hard thing to do, and she’s done it expertly.”