Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Basketball Hall of Famer Val Ackerman

I recently interviewed Basketball Hall of Famer Val Ackerman on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is one of the most successful and accomplished women in the history of sports business. Val Ackerman was the founding president of the WNBA, was the president of USA Basketball, is the commissioner of the Big East, and is a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. Val, thank you for joining us.

Val: Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Adam: You grew up in Pennington, New Jersey, and you grew up in a family that was deeply passionate about sports. Your grandfather was the athletic director at Trenton State College in New Jersey. Your dad was the athletic director at your high school. And you were a basketball star both in high school and in college. Can you take listeners back to those days, those early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Val: I guess I would start, Adam, since you referenced my family, I'd point there first. I was heavily influenced, like I think many young people are or could be, by the experiences of their parents and their professions. As you noted, my grandfather was a coach and an AD. My grandfather, also proud to say, was a player. He played basketball at Springfield College, which is where the Basketball Hall of Fame is located. During my induction speech there a few years ago, I actually made reference to my Springfield connection through my grandfather. That was 100 years ago that he would have played there. 

So he influenced me in his way. And then my dad was a very supportive dad of a girl who played sports before Title IX was passed. Growing up in my small town in New Jersey, there weren't many opportunities for girls to play sports, organized opportunities anyway. We had backyard stuff, neighborhood stuff, and basement stuff, but it wasn't really until I got to high school. that I was able to play on organized teams for girls. And as you noted, my dad was the AD, the athletics director at my high school. So that was not only a lot of fun to be able to pop into his office between classes but to know that he could come to my games and was part of the brain trust that formed the athletic conference that my high school eventually came to play in. 

My dad was one of the founding fathers of the Colonial Valley Conference in Mercer County, New Jersey. That made a big impression on me, really. And so I was fortunate enough to extend my playing career through college and a little bit after. It's in my DNA, to be honest, have gotten into this line of work. I'm not an athletic director like my dad or my grandfather, but I think I'm pretty close to that with my work with ADs at my schools. And if I had to point to one thing, looking back in terms of how I got to where I am today, in terms of my upbringing, it really would be the influence of my dad and my grandfather.

Adam: Something that you shared, which is really important. The power of opportunity. You grew up in a time when there weren't nearly as many opportunities for women to participate in sports, whether it was the opportunity to play organized sports or the opportunity to work in sports. Both of those areas have changed a lot over the years. You're a driving reason as to why. And when we think about the role of leaders, the role of mentors, a huge part of it is creating opportunities for others.

Val: I would agree. I did not have, growing up, many women to look up to off the playing field. When I was coming up in the early 70s, for example, the women athletes who got the most visibility at that time were the Olympians every four years or every two years, if you count the Winter Games and then the Summer Games and then the Winter Games. The gymnasts, the figure skaters, and the runners were all people that you just waited to see when their time came and they were in the Olympics and they got the visibility that the platform provided then and still provides. That was impactful. 

But beyond that, you didn't see very many women, many in what I would call leadership positions in the sports world. And in fact, when I started out in this business, I started out as a staff lawyer for the NBA back in the late 80s. There were no women executives really to emulate. My mentors were all the leaders of the NBA at that time, led by David Stern, and his deputy commissioner Russ Granick, The CMO Rick Welts later went on to become the president of the Golden State Warriors. Those are the guys that I looked up to and learned from and who got me on conference calls and on boards and in meeting rooms and really taught me a lot of what I know today about how the sports world works and how a league office functions. 

And so it's not lost on me that now I have the opportunity to be a bit of an inspiration to some of these young women who are middle manager women who are coming up the ladder. I try very hard to be a good mentor whenever that opportunity presents itself. I've been involved in many organizations and meetings to that effect. I do think that's critically important that the leaders of tomorrow have a chance to learn from the leaders of today. So I take that to heart.

Adam: You were a top student at the University of Virginia, academic, all-American. You went to UCLA Law School, got a job working for the NBA. How did you ultimately rise within your career and what are the keys for anyone listening to this conversation to rise in their career?

Val: Well, number one, it was not a straight line. That's point number one is often career paths aren't upward trajectories where you can predict over one year, two years or five years, you're going to go from point A to point B. I always tell young people how important it is to get comfortable with zigging and zagging. For me, the pathway included Law school, after I got out of college, in between law school and college, I played for a women's pro basketball team in France. That was my semester abroad. I never had a chance to see the world. 

After college, I wanted to work in sports right out of law school, but the opportunity just didn't present itself because I had no job experience, and sports law jobs at that time were very limited. So I had to go to Plan B, which for me was to work at a law firm after law school. I worked for a large New York City Wall Street firm. Got a couple of years of experience there. I met my husband, Charlie, at the firm. So that was another detour for me. He and I decided to get married. I stepped away from the workforce for a little while. 

And then an opportunity presented itself a few years later to become a staff lawyer for the National Basketball Association, which was a dream come true for me. That was my dream job, to work for the NBA. The small legal department at that time. I think I was the fourth lawyer, first woman lawyer to work for the league office. And that's really how it got going. I got my foot in the door. Frankly, I worked very hard there. worked for the top people, so I was able to learn from the best. Gary Bettman hired me, now the commissioner of the National Hockey League. Russ Granick and David Stern, two of the best minds in basketball, were my bosses, too. 

And then that really paved the way, ultimately, for my work in women's basketball when the NBA decided to start the WNBA after the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. So these are all things, Adam, I never would have projected or predicted when I was in college or law school. I had no way of knowing that would be my journey. I didn't plan for any of that, but when the opportunities presented themselves, I was in a good spot and had the ability to make a decision about whether I wanted to keep moving with some of these growth opportunities. And that really is what happened. And then good things happened when I was able to get in these roles and show what I could do and get the job done. And I guess here I am today now almost 36 years since I've been in this business.

Adam: I love it. A lot of great lessons there. There is no linear path to success. You use the words zig and zag. You along the way took a detour and that detour led to tremendous success outside of your career. You met your husband. That led to starting a family. Plan B could be better than Plan A. Plan B could ultimately lead you back to Plan A as it did with you. You don't know what kind of opportunities are going to ultimately present themselves to you. But the best way to capitalize on the opportunities that will ultimately come your way is by doing what you just shared with listeners that you did along the way. Do great work. Keep your head down and focus on the job at hand. Develop a strong set of skills. Keep an open mind and continue to prove yourself by showing up every day and delivering to the best of your abilities.

Val: I agree 100% with that counsel. That was really all I ever knew was to work hard. I sometimes use the adage, there's no traffic on the extra mile. It really does make a difference to put in time, to be thorough in the way you attack a problem, and to learn from a mistake. And I've sure made my share over the years, just like most, if not all successful people have. Everybody's failed at something and you have to learn from that and come back tougher the next time. I really do think all of that is true. I think the challenge for us as human beings is how to find balance in our lives. And I've struggled with that for sure over the years. You know, I'm married. I have two kids. My daughters now are almost 32 and almost 30. They were little girls, basically, just a little past toddler age when the WNBA was launched. 

And so I was left running around, especially in the summertime when your kids are off from school, trying to do my work with a league that was operating in the summer months. And so I feel like I've kind of seen a lot here in terms of how to do a job, how to try to balance it with your married life, your family life, being a good parent. It isn't easy. I just would warn any listener who's trying to do it all. You can do it all for a while. That was my experience. But at some point you may just kind of run out of steam. And that's really what led to my leaving the WNBA after eight seasons running the league and being part of the launch in the years leading up to that. It was really just about stepping back and feeling like I'd done what I could do to get it off the ground, and that I needed to direct my energies elsewhere in my life, again, as a human being, not as a working person, and then did some other things for a while, and then the opportunity to lead the Big East presented itself. 

Again, back to my earlier point, nothing I ever expected, never had that as a dream. It just materialized as an opportunity, and the timing was right, and I felt like I could offer something to the position, and seemed like it would be fun. And so I took it and here I am today entering my 12th year doing this work. So again, a lot of life is creating your own breaks, but some of it just is about responding to the breaks when they present themselves.

Adam: What advice do you have for anyone listening trying to figure out how can I attain balance in my life? How can I attain great success in my career and attain great success outside of my career?

Val: You have to be very intentional about it because I find especially in our 24-7 death by email, as I call it, The world never shuts off. The world doesn't ever just stop and say, OK, Val's tired. We're going to tell everybody not to send her any emails or to stop the meeting requests or whatever it might be. That's part of your work. It just doesn't work that way. So I found you have to just be strategic about how you take your time off, finding the breaks when you can, and making sure you take care of yourself. try to eat relatively healthily. I'm a former athlete, so I'm inclined to work out but don't always have the time to do that. So you have to work hard to get into a gym or a bike ride if you have that vehicle. You know, I was a competitive swimmer coming up, so I love to do that. Finding time for family is critical. If you expect your family to support you, you have to support them. 

And trying to find that balance between the obligations to your work or to your friends or to yourself And then the people in your life that matter the most to you, working them in is something else you have to be very intentional about and caring about. So I don't think there's one formula, Adam. I don't think there's like, here's the list on how to do that. I think it's personal. Everybody's got to figure out for themselves how they want to fit the pieces of their life together. That's been a journey for me. It's again, why I left the WNBA, because the pieces were out of whack at the time I left. And I needed that eight-year gap between the WNBA and the Big East to try to get some things back in order for me. And frankly, I'm a better leader in the Big East because of it. The time I was at the NBA, the time I was at the WNBA, the things I did after I left, and then what I learned from all of that in a cumulative way has made me a better leader. in the position that I'm in now. And everybody, I'm sure, will have a similar experience in terms of how their journey unfolded as well.

Adam: You've evolved as a leader. The WNBA has evolved as a league. Women's basketball is in a very different place today than it was not only when you started but when you left. What were the best lessons you learned from your experience leading the WNBA and from that era?

Val: I would say a lead lesson was the importance of collaboration. When the WNBA launched, we had the highest possible support at the top from David Stern on down. David wasn't green-lighting this project. It wasn't going to happen. He was at the top of the food chain in terms of support. But nearly everybody in the company at that time, which was a smaller place nearly 30 years ago, but everybody in the company was told this is a priority project for the office. And so we need everybody to chip in. My job really became, for lack of a better word, an air traffic controller, being the person who was a bridge among all the departments. that had a hand in getting the league off the ground. 

And it was every department. I mean, we relied on the basketball people, the TV people, the sponsorship people, the licensing people, the human resources department, the PR department, the video department, everybody was in on it. And I really took a lot of pride in my ability to bring together all of those pieces in a coordinated way. And that's what it was. I, to this day, call it a group effort of the highest order. 

And so that is critical to good leadership. is recognizing you can't do everything by yourself. I have an expression and a frame in my office by Helen Keller, alone we can do so little, together we can do so much. That really was our credo with the WNBA and how I felt in the same way about bringing back the Big East in 2013. So I think about that a lot. I think about how, frankly, we were ahead of our time when we launched the WNBA. Society wasn't where it is today. in terms of the acceptance of women, the acceptance of gay people, and the fervor with which people are supporting strong black women. It just wasn't so a generation ago. Not in the same way. We had our pocket of core fans, and core supporters, but there were naysayers around every corner who didn't think this could happen or should happen. 

So we had to fight off a lot of resistance, not often articulated, but we knew it was there. And so now I think society has lifted the league, it's helped lift women's soccer, it's helped women athletes of all kinds to get their due. Along the way, we've had leaders of all types, men and women alike, who have brought increasing sophistication and knowledge, and tenacity to the operation of these outlets. It's one thing to have good athletes, but if you don't have good leadership, If you don't have capitalization, if you don't have thoughtful operational expertise, these leagues aren't going to make it. 

And so it's been heartening as well to see more women than ever involved in the operation of WNBA, NWSL, the list goes on, women's tennis, women's golf, and I know the principals at all of these places. To have that sort of leadership and brainpower and super expertise is important too and very heartening. And I think that's going to keep women's sports going and growing.

Adam: What makes a great leader? What can anyone do to become a better leader?

Val: I think leadership is a combination of some innate skills and attributes among them. Stamina, that's a big one, frankly. Because it just says, per my earlier comment, it doesn't end. The inbox is always full. So you've got to find a way to pace yourself and prioritize and just keep going. No rest for the weary is really true in the work world, particularly at the leadership level. It's the ability to communicate. It's the ability to make a decision. There's some courage associated with leadership. Sometimes it's scary to make a decision. So you got to have a little bit of strength, confidence in yourself and courage to make the tough call. And that is sometimes it's a combination of your expertise, but also your character. I think integrity is a big part of leadership, doing the right thing. 

And I think being a compassionate leader by that, I mean, just caring about the people who are helping you do your job. You have to have a good staff to do the things that you have to get done as a leader. You can't do it by yourself. But your staff has to know that you care about them as people and that you're grateful to them. And so I'm a big proponent of expressions of gratitude. That sometimes just comes naturally to some, not to others. And then beyond that, there are the hard skills, if you will, versus the soft skills, the expertise, the know-how, the wisdom that comes with doing a job over a period of time, making a mistake or two. 

So you learn from that. Trying to be a bit of a jack of all, when you're my chair, we run a lot of departments here. So I've got to know a little bit about everything. I don't know everything about everything, but I know enough, I think to ask the right questions and to jump in if I sense something is amiss with something that we're doing and needs my intervention. And then finally, leaders are good collaborators, per my earlier point. You've got to learn to delegate. It's a form of collaboration. You've got to know who to involve in decision-making. And that's important in a model we have in college sports where I've got to think about, OK, do I bring the presidents of my schools into this decision? How about my ADs? They're the athletic directors who run the athletic departments at our schools. 

We're in a basketball-intensive league here. So that means at times I've got to work in our men's basketball coaches to a particular matter or our women's basketball coaches to a particular matter. We have business partners. We collaborate with them. We have a major network television agreement with Fox Sports. We have a major venue licensing agreement with Madison Square Garden here in New York. And so you've got to be collaborative in terms of working with them and understanding what their agenda is. Why are they in business with us? What are they trying to get out of the relationship? So it means asking questions, being intellectually curious, and having the information you need in order to make a decision and do your job. 

Some of that is, you know, again, if you're a natural, sometimes you can pick up things more easily, but look, I've been at this for 36 years. I still don't get it right all the time. But I know enough now over this long journey and having worked for the people that I've worked for, I've tried to emulate in some ways, I think I have a pretty good sense of how to work this. And hopefully, as I said earlier, there's people that are coming up behind me who are going to learn a little bit from what I did but are going to have their own experiences are in turn going to be effective leaders in their own right.

Adam: Val, I love that list. The first thing you shared right off the bat, was stamina. Another way of looking at stamina is when you're deeply passionate about what you do, when you love the work that you're doing, you're going to have a lot more energy, you're going to have a lot more staying power, you're going to have a lot more stamina. Leaders who are passionate, leaders who wake up in the morning fired up, ready to go, ready to get at it, are going to be a lot more likely to be successful. 

The importance of communication, the importance of being able to make decisions, Good leaders make decisions. Great leaders make good decisions. Integrity, honesty, compassion. You use the word gratitude. Leaders care. Leaders care about people. Leaders care about the people they lead. Leaders care, period. Care about their stakeholders and the interests of those around them. Being able to see things from other people's perspectives speaks to the importance of collaboration. You spoke about the importance of delegation. Leaders need to empower others, need to position others to be in the right place to succeed. Great leaders ask great questions. Leaders need to be competent. Leaders need to have expertise in their fields. You don't need to know the most about every single topic. You don't need to be the ultimate expert in everything. 

That's not the job of a leader, but you have to know enough to be able to empower the people on your team who have that expertise and to help them ultimately become the best at what they do. Curiosity and then the last thing that you shared The importance of humility self-awareness knowing what you don't know being open about what your strengths are what your weaknesses are being willing to Say I don't know this I'm not good at this. This is an area that I either need to get a lot better in or I need to find someone who can compliment me. The only way you're going to be able to get there is by possessing self-awareness and by possessing humility.

Val: Did I say that? It sounds good to me. That sounds good to me. Thanks for the takeaway. I would add one thing is I do think leaders today need to be well-read. It's another thing. It speaks to the intellectual curiosity point. But you need to know what's going on in the world around you. And sports world is no different than any other industry sector. You need to have a handle on what's happening in our society, and what's happening on the news. What are the latest developments in technology? For example, artificial intelligence now. is the rage. Trying to understand what the applications might be in the sports space is something people are trying to get their arms around. 

Politics are going to play a role probably in what happens in the future of college sports because of the legal atmosphere around college sports, the possibility of Congress intervening as it relates to some of the legal threats to the collegiate model, and the interpretation of antitrust, labor, Title IX, etc. in our space. It may take Congress to reconcile those threads and kind of get the NCAA and the conferences and the schools away from what's been a very turbulent and litigious operating landscape. And that may depend on who the next administration is. That adds to the point about exhaustion and trying to keep up with things and starting every day right with reading all your news feeds. That one is important as any because you can't think of yourself as being in a silo. Sports especially touches so many different parts of society. You have to be up on, on all of that, the cultural ramifications, the societal pieces, et cetera, et cetera. I found if you want to remain effective.

Adam: I like how you described the landscape of college athletics today as a turbulent landscape. What advice do you have for leaders on how to lead in a turbulent landscape, how to lead in times of change, how to lead in this kind of setting?

Val: It adds to the workload for sure, trying to keep up with what's happening around you, trying to be collaborative where possible. An example was COVID, trying to adapt to the many curveballs that COVID threw, not only obviously to the college sports world and the sports world, but society at large, was really exhausting. And the collaboration point involved conferring, in our case, with other conferences. What are you doing? How are you handling contact tracing? Are you going to have fans at games? What happens if an athlete tests positive? Do we have to cancel the game? How's all that going to work? when they cross state lines and there's a different law in Rhode Island than there is in Connecticut around case management, that was wild. I'm not going to mince words there. That was wild trying to get through that. 

And so I don't know that we'll ever go through anything like that again. I hope we don't. But in the current environment, it really is about keeping abreast of developments As I mentioned, there are a lot of legal developments that have hit in college boards that we're trying to keep up with. Trying to explain those, being able to explain those to my schools in ways that they can understand. Some of it is complex. Trying to think ahead to what some of these changes might mean for your school. I do think another trait of good leaders is their ability to think about tomorrow. That advice I got from a good leader at one point in my career was, today's taken care of. You don't have to think about today. What you have to think about is tomorrow. 

And I would give David Stern a lot of credit on that. He was really adept at, as I used to say, looking around the corner and seeing what might be on the horizon and coming up with a plan for that, and communicating to the people who worked for him how he needed them to think about with him how to plan for what he thought was coming or what he knew was coming. So whether that was women, the importance of women to the game of basketball, technology, what he was able to do in terms of the NBA's global reach. I learned from him and others the importance of trying to think ahead to next week or next month when the next board meeting is, or where are we going to be in a year. And how am I going to do my strategic plan? 

So you do the best you can, Adam. It's kind of how you do it. You just figure out what you can control, plan around that. Whatever you can't control, you try to create contingency plans around. You do the best with the information that you have. You try to be communicative with others who are around you. So to the extent they have a say or a role in the change-making or the change adaptation, they're equipped, they're not in the dark. And sometimes it's about a little bit of luck, to be honest. Things just happen to turn out the right way. So no one way to do it, but certainly something that we have to think about in an environment right now that's very fluid for us.

Adam: What advice do you have for women on how to excel in male-dominated industries? What advice do you have for men on how to become better allies? And what advice do you have for anyone listening to this conversation on how to become a more inclusive leader?

Val: For women who work in this line of work, and I hope nobody takes offense to this comment, you have to be part woman and part man in terms of the traditional stereotypical attributes. I spend a lot of time still in meetings where I'm the only woman in the room, sometimes running that meeting. I have been successful by being authentic in myself and friendly in the way I talk. I don't have airs about me. I can talk about sports with anybody. So that's always helpful when you're dealing with people in my line of work, knowing not just what's going on in college basketball in my case or college sports, but also following what happened in golf or tennis or football or the Olympics, you name it. You got to be conversational in my world in sports writ large. Because that's the small talk in my world, too. You've got to have a tough character and a thick-skinned approach to things sometimes. Things don't always go your way and you can't take things personally. You can't be overly sensitive. 

You just got to keep marching on. I'm a different person when I'm around female colleagues. It's just different. I can't explain it, but we just interface with each other in a different way than I think we would interface with our male colleagues. There's a real sisterhood I found. for women who work in sports. It's a different sisterhood for women who work in men's sports versus women who work in women's sports, but you just have to be adaptive to the circles that you're in. And being a good person, most of all, I think works no matter what your gender or how you identify, just being a good person. 

Be reliable, be honest, be trustworthy, express gratitude, be a good team player. Anybody who does that has got a leg up. So that's important. For male allyship, it's important, I think, to the extent women are still somewhat underrepresented, especially the higher you go up the ladder. I think any male leader out there in sports, take to heart your role, the importance of your responsibility to mentor young women, just like I got mentored by David Stern and Russ Granick and Rick Welts. I learned from them and they took a shine to me and I wouldn't be here without their mentorship before that became a thing. We still need more of that and I hope any male leaders listening to this talk take that to heart and know that's critically important to young men and young women alike. 

And in terms of inclusive environments, I think that falls on the leader. That's your responsibility to make sure that people on your staff especially feel valued. They feel good about the job they're doing. They know what their place is in your organization. They feel like you want them to be there, to be part of things. We do staff retreats here, try to do social events. It's gotten a little harder with post COVID hybrid and working environments, but we do our best to make sure that we have as family-like an atmosphere as you can have on the job. 

The leaders who can create that kind of culture within their organizations have the best shot at retaining staff and recruiting staff because word gets around what kind of a workplace you have. If somebody's looking for a new job, they're probably asking around, what's it like to work there? Does leadership care about the people who work at the company? So your reputation in many ways is at stake with respect to how it is that you run your workforce. That's a critically important thing to keep in mind.

Adam: Val, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of 30-Minute Mentors.

Val: Thanks, Adam. Great being with you.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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