April 22, 2022
Valerie B. Ackerman, J.D. ’20Hon.
Commissioner, BIG EAST Conference
Keynote Speaker, Undergraduate Commencement
Val Ackerman is commissioner of the BIG EAST Conference, the NCAA Division I athletic conference that includes Providence College.
Ms. Ackerman became the fifth BIG EAST commissioner in 2013, following its reorganization as a basketball-centered conference, and led the office relocation to New York City. She manages the conference’s partnerships with Fox Sports, which provides game coverage on FOX, FS1, and FS2, and with Madison Square Garden, which hosts the BIG EAST Tournament every March. She also led the negotiations that brought the University of Connecticut, a charter BIG EAST school, back to the conference in 2020.
Ms. Ackerman grew up in Pennington, N.J. She attended the University of Virginia as one of the school’s first female student-athlete scholarship recipients and became the first 1,000-point scorer in basketball program history. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political and social thought, she played a year of professional basketball in France. She then earned a law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.
After working in a private law practice, Ms. Ackerman joined the NBA as a staff attorney in 1988 and later served as special assistant to NBA Commissioner David Stern and as NBA vice president of business affairs. From 1996-2005, she was the first president of the Women’s National Basketball Association. In 2005, she was elected president of USA Basketball, leading the men’s and women’s teams to gold medal performances at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. She also served two terms as the U.S. representative to the International Basketball Federation.
In 2010, Ms. Ackerman assisted the National Hockey League in formulating a long-term plan to support women’s ice hockey, and in 2013 she prepared a comprehensive white paper for the NCAA on growth strategies for women’s college basketball.
In 2021, Ms. Ackerman was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, which presented her with its John Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010 and serves on its board of directors. She is a board member of Women Leaders in College Sports, a mentor in the U.S. State Department’s Global Sports Mentoring Program, and an advisor to the Vatican’s Sport at the Service of Humanity initiative.
Ms. Ackerman and her husband, Charlie Rappaport, live in New York City. They are the parents of two daughters, Emily and Sally.
