For Val Ackerman, basketball was Big East’s lighthouse

With Val Ackerman in her final days as Big East Commissioner, the tributes continue to pour in.

Russ Granik, the NBA’s deputy commissioner when Ackerman ran the WNBA, says, “Even though she hasn’t been [in the WNBA] for the last 20 years, there’s nobody that deserves more credit for what it’s turned into than Val.”

And Katelyn West, the emerging SVP and assistant general counsel at the NBA — and recent SBJ 40-under-40 honoree — says: “She’s a legend in our offices. … I spent the better part of the last two years working on the W’s CBA. And so there was a lot of talk about Val and her impact on the W over the course of those years.”

But her impact on the Big East is both palpable … and aesthetic. I visited her at the league’s Empire State Building offices this summer — a tall building fitting for a tall basketball league — and she showed me a conference room wall plastered with the slogan: “The March of the Big East Goes On.”

Her legacy actually depends on it. She rebooted the conference in 2014, at a time its brand was twisting in the wind, and she says she stuck that slogan on the wall “just as a way of reminding everybody of all the thick and thin this league’s been through. Over 47 years. So yeah, it’s going to keep marching on.”

She means it when she says it. All over that Empire State Building offices were old media guides from the 1980s, odes to Chris Mullin, Patrick Ewing, Jim Boeheim, Rollie Massimino, John Thompson and Madison Square Garden. She even showed me a panoramic view of MSG from her office desk.

“I’m just respectful of the history here because it matters,’’ Ackerman says. “And that really drove the business plan for this iteration of the conference. It was about going back to the basketball roots after it had become football and all that.”

As we kept roaming the rooms there, her 13-year Big East tenure winding down, there was one more full-circle moment. Turns out, those Empire State Building offices also contain a TV studio, used at times by Fox 5 in NYC to produce New York Liberty games.

Val Ackerman, the Big East … and the WNBA. All in one building. The perfect ending.