USA BASKETBALL PRESIDENT VAL ACKERMAN TO SPEAK AT CORTLAND SPORT MANAGEMENT AWARDS CEREMONY

March 22, 2006 - Val Ackerman, president of USA Basketball and the founding president of the WNBA, will deliver the keynote address at the Sixth Annual Cortland Sport Management Awards Ceremony Tuesday, April 25 on the SUNY Cortland campus. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Brown Auditorium in the Old Main Building and will begin at 6 p.m. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

In May 2005 Ackerman became the first female president of USA Basketball for the 2005-2008 term. 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.

She is perhaps best known for being the first president of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), serving from 1996-2005. Over the course of her historic term, Ackerman would become the first woman ever to successfully launch a women's team oriented sports league for the duration of eight years.

Ackerman, who grew up in Pennington, New Jersey, graduated from the University of Virginia in 1981, where she was a four-year starter for the women's basketball team and a two-time Academic All-American. She also earned a law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and worked for two years as an associate at the New York law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

Ackerman played professional basketball in France for one season. Then 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.

The awards ceremony is organized each year by Cortland’s sport management department to spotlight student excellence in both academics and service learning activities. The following awards will be presented: Outstanding Sophomore, Outstanding Junior, Outstanding Senior, the Bogard Scholarship, the Excelsior Award, the Sport Law Award, the Information Technology in Sport Award, the Wingate Scholarship and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence.

SUNY Cortland’s innovative sport management department currently has over 370 students enrolled in its undergraduate degree program. Students are provided with both the formal academic foundation and the additional key experiential learning opportunities necessary to gain access to a career in the extremely competitive sport industry. The only four-year sport management undergraduate degree program in the SUNY system, it is housed in the college's school of professional studies. The Cortland Sport Managment Department will launch the first sport management graduate program in the SUNY System in fall 2006. SUNY Cortland is located in Cortland, a Central New York town located at the eastern gateway to New York State’s Finger Lakes Region.

This event is supported by the SUNY Cortland Sport Management Club and the Hampton Inn.