By: FFI: Chuck Stogel, MBWA - 914-428-6111, chstogel@aol.com
NEW YORK (March 6, 2025) ---
Val Ackerman, commissioner of the
Big East Conference, will be honored in April with a Distinguished Service Award from the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association.
The DSA presentation will be made at the 92nd MBWA All-Met Haggerty Awards Dinner scheduled Thursday, April 24, at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel & Conference Center in Tarrytown, NY.
Ackerman is being recognized for her meritorious service to athletics in many forms and at many levels, including college basketball and, most notably, overseeing the rebirth of the Big East Conference. She has had a long and accomplished career in the sports industry and is one of the few executives in sports who has held leadership positions in both men’s and women’s sports at the collegiate, professional, national team and international levels.
Named the fifth Commissioner of the Big East Conference on June 26, 2013, Ackerman was the founding President of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) and is a past President of USA Basketball. She is an inductee of the Naismith Memorial Basketball of Fame (2021) and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame (2011), among other Halls. In 2016, she received the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Billie Jean King Contribution Award for significant contributions to the development and advancement of women’s sports.
While at the helm of the Big East, Ackerman has presided over the realignment and growth of the conference with its current configuration of 11 member schools. In 2014, she led the relocation of the conference office from Providence, RI, to its current site in New York City. She has managed the league’s fruitful partnerships with Fox Sports, which provides wall-to-wall coverage annually of Big East men’s basketball on FOX, FS1 and FS2, and with Madison Square Garden, which has hosted the conference’s men’s basketball tournament since 1983. In 2024, the conference entered into a successor media rights agreement that will provide broad national television coverage for Big East basketball through 2031 on multiple Fox Sports, NBC/Peacock and TNT Sports platforms, and extended its agreement to keep the conference tournament at MSG through 2032.
As a collegian herself, Ackerman attended the University of Virginia as one of the school's first female student-athlete scholarship recipients. She was a four-year starter, three-time captain and two-time Academic All-American for the Cavaliers women’s basketball team and the first 1,000-point scorer in the program's history. She graduated with high distinction with a degree in political and social thought in 1981 and played one year of professional basketball in France before earning a law degree from UCLA in 1985. She received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Providence College in 2021.
Ackerman is currently a member of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee. She is on the Board of Directors of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame and is a Lifetime Trustee of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, which presented her with the John Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. She has received innumerable honors from a multitude of sports, business, educational, legal and service organizations.
Ackerman is married to Charlie Rappaport, a retired tax partner of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. They have two adult daughters, Emily and Sally.
Click here for a list of the MBWA’s previous DSA honorees: Distinguished Service Awards (year-by-year).
--- www.metbasketballwriters.org ---