Career
Ackerman played professional basketball in France for one season. In 1988, she served as a staff attorney for the National Basketball Association and as special assistant to NBA Commissioner David Stern, director of business affairs and vice president of business affairs prior to her appointment to head the WNBA in 1996. Ackerman lives in New York City with her husband, Charles Rappaport, and her two daughters, Emily and Sally.
From 1995-1996, she was a driving force behind the creation of the historic USA Basketball Women's Senior National Team program that culminated with a 60-0 record and the gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
On August 7, 1996, Ackerman was named president of the WNBA. Over the course of her historic term, Ackerman would become the first women ever to successfully launch and operate a women's team sports league for the duration of eight years. In the process, she played Hartford like a fiddle, using the city as leverage to land a more lucratove deal at the Mohegan Sun Indian Reservation for the team that became known as the Connecticut Sun. On February 1, 2005 Ackerman stepped down, and Donna Orender was named as her successor.
She currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Board of Directors of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and the Board of Directors of the Virginia Athletics Foundation. In 2006, Ackerman was named the U.S. delegate to the Central Board of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA).
In May 2005 she became the first female president of USA Basketball for the 2005-2008 term, succeeding Tom Jernstedt from the NCAA, who served from 2000-2004. During her term, she oversaw a restructuring of the USA Basketball Board of Directors and gold medal performances by the men's and women's basketball teams at the Beijing Olympics. In 2008, she received the IOC's Women of Distinction diploma and the John Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 2010, she was named an inductee of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame's Class of 2011. She currently teaches Leadership and Personnel Management with Neal Pilson in Columbia University's Master of Science in Sports Management Program.
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