The standard.
For anyone looking for a career in basketball – and wanting to excel with fierce determination, navigate the toughest challenges with impeccable style and grace, while still accomplishing the task at hand – they need to look no further than Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer Val Ackerman.
After four decades of service to professional and college basketball in many roles, including her current position as the commissioner of the Big East Conference, Ackerman is retiring after 13 years at the helm, bringing the league back to its historic place in college athletics after nearly coming close to extinction.
Ackerman will leave the position, effective Aug. 31, and a national search for her successor will start immediately and be led by the conference's Board of Directors.
"When we re-founded the Big East in 2013 as a basketball-centric conference, our first task was to find a commissioner who could provide the strategic vision needed to position us as a basketball peer with our football counterparts and compete with the country’s best. We found that visionary leader in Val Ackerman," said St. John’s President Rev. Brian J. Shanley, O.P., Chair of the Big East Board of Directors. "She leaves big shoes to fill."
Ackerman said her first contract at the Big East was for five years. After that contract had nearly expired, it was clear the conference's powers-that-be didn't want her going anywhere.
"Then they came back and said they wanted to sign me to a second contract. They said, how about five years?" Ackerman told USA TODAY Sports, hilariously explaining how she ended up staying for 13 years.
"I said, 'okay. How about three?' So I did that, then that contract ran out, and they came back to me and said, 'Can we sign you up for another five years?' And I said, 'how about three?' And then I went through that, and then they came again and said 'how about another five?' And I say, 'how about one?' "
The league is thriving with competitive teams and armed with a new media rights agreement with FOX, NBC Sports and TNT Sports through the 2030-31 season. The obvious question is, why leave now?
"It just felt like the time was right for me. I'd come back to what retirement means. I did what I was hired to do, which was to put the pieces back together again when this storied league broke up," she said, adding she is leaving on her own volition.
Reflections on a 'pinch me' career
From a little girl shooting hoops outside of her Pennington, New Jersey home to playing at the University of Virginia, Ackerman knew she wanted to work in sports after earning a law degree from UCLA in 1985.
After being hired as a corporate associate at Simpson Thacher in New York, she tried in vain to secure her dream job. She still kept the numerous rejection letters, including one from the NBA. Undeterred, the opportunity came three years later, and the call came from Gary Bettman, the future NHL Commissioner, who at the time was the NBA's general counsel and senior vice president, and who hired Ackerman as a junior lawyer at the league office.
Once David Stern called her into his office 18 months later, asking her to help out on various projects, her career took off, including the timing of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) allowing nations to determine their own rules for professional athletes to compete at the Olympics.
Ackerman got to travel to the Barcelona Olympics with the original Dream Team and laid the groundwork for the women to follow suit, eventually leading to the formation of the women's team in Atlanta in 1996 and her being asked to be the WNBA's first top executive.
"That was a kind of a pinch-me moment working on the first Dream Team. I was there with some bandwidth and was asked to help out. So it wasn't a surprise that they asked me to do it," Ackerman said about the WNBA. "It was an honor, not quite a surprise, because I was sort of the person in-house at that time who was the women's basketball person."
Ackerman served as WNBA president for eight years, and the league thrived in its first few years before the novelty of women's professional basketball began to erode.
"Things cooled off, and there were some hard years there as it related to numbers dropping and teams folding," she said. "And we couldn't always relocate them. And that was eight years, and then my kids were getting older, and I don't know, I would say there were moments I missed as a parent because of my focus on work. Yeah, wish I could get some of those moments back."
Rebirth of the Big East
When Ackerman was tapped to lead the Big East after seven schools (DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall, and Villanova) separated from the original conference and from the football-playing schools to team up with Butler, Creighton, and Xavier, she knew that she was taking on a Herculean task. UConn completed the Big East reclamation project when it rejoined the league in 2020.
Armed with a cell phone and pretty much nothing else, the mandate from the league's presidents was clear: restore the glory and prestige of a once proud league, with the confidence to do it how you see fit.
When asked how difficult the job at hand would be on a scale of 1-10, Ackerman was not shy in her assessment of what she faced.
"25," she says, almost matter-of-factly. "It was really challenging, the most challenging thing I've ever done in my career. Even when the WNBA launched, we had David Stern make it a company priority, and I was sort of the tip of the spear, but the whole company was told this is a priority project. Here it was, at the beginning, really just me, for the most part, I tried to be resourceful in terms of getting other people involved, trying to hop quickly. But it was a true startup."
The conference has thrived on the biggest stages with Villanova winning national championships in 2016 and 2018 and UConn in 2023 and 2024. The UConn women were the last team standing five times during her tenure (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2025).
Thinking about legacy
As the clock ticks for when Ackerman departs the conference's headquarters at the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan, she reflects on her career, and those "pinch me" moments start to flood her mind, especially the impact that she has had on women.
"I hope I showed what women can do, and I hope I've been at least, in a modest way, an example to women who are either in the business and want to move up, or women who want to get in the business," Ackerman said. "It can be done, ladies."
So how will a person who seems to be everywhere, including traveling to 25 different cities in the past three months, slow down to enjoy retirement?
"I think retirement for me means, you know, it's like what some people will do to get a vacation," she said.
Ackerman, who is also a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the State of New Jersey Hall of Fame, will also enjoy the spoils of life, but just being a regular person, including being entertained by things that don't resemble sports.
"I'm an animal lover. We've had a string of cats, including right now, we're taking care of my older daughter's cat. I've tried to maintain and stay true to my athlete roots. I do try to work out, and I love to swim. I've glommed onto the Peloton in recent years to try to stave off the effects of aging. I like to read.
"My husband (Charlie Rappaport, a retired tax partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett) and I watch our shows every night. I mean, I need to watch a French cop show to sort of recharge my battery."
The admitted "chocaholic" plans to spend her time cleaning out her closets, traveling more, focusing on donating to charities, especially environmental causes, and finding anything on Brit Box to watch.
So the next person who inherits the Big East knows what they need to do to continue the success Ackerman built.
"I think when you're in these jobs, you're not in them forever. That's just the nature of the beast. Everyone is working a shift at the end of the day. And I think your hope is that when it was your turn, when the baton got passed to you, you ran a good race," she said.
"I've climbed the mountains. Every mountain that I ever wanted to climb, I've climbed it. If there's a legacy piece, I hope it's at least about what I've done for women and the game of basketball."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Val Ackerman retiring as Big East commissioner after 13 years
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