Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman to Retire After Rebuilding Conference

Val Ackerman will retire from the Big East on August 31, ending a 13-year run that helped stabilize one of college basketball’s most recognizable conferences after a wrenching split. The league said a national search for her successor will begin immediately, marking a transition at a moment when conference power is still being reshaped by football economics and athlete compensation.

Ackerman, 66, became the Big East’s fifth commissioner on June 26, 2013, two years after seven then-current members, DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova, broke away from the original league and rebuilt the conference around basketball with Butler, Creighton and Xavier. That left the Big East with a sharper identity, but also with the burden of proving that a basketball-centric model could still thrive in a landscape increasingly dominated by football-driven realignment.

The answer, under Ackerman, was to protect the league’s brand while adding back marquee value. One of her defining moves was the return of UConn, negotiated in 2019 and made effective July 1, 2020, restoring a program that had long helped define the league’s national profile. That move gave the Big East a stronger basketball center of gravity and underscored Ackerman’s focus on preserving relevance without chasing the expense-heavy football model.

She also helped secure the conference’s commercial footing. On July 8, 2025, the Big East and ESPN announced a six-year digital media rights deal that will stream more than 300 Big East events annually on ESPN+. The conference said Ackerman believed long-term business deals were in place and that the time was right to hand off the baton. FOX Sports and Madison Square Garden remain part of the league’s foundation as well, reinforcing the Big East’s position in New York and on national television.

The league says its men’s and women’s basketball programs combined to produce five national champions over the past decade, while ESPN credited Ackerman’s tenure with a combined eight national championships. The Big East, founded on May 29, 1979, still casts a long shadow because its original seven-school core was the country’s first power conference, and Ackerman spent her tenure defending that legacy while adapting to a far more professionalized sport.

Rev. Brian J. Shanley, the St. John’s president and Big East board chair, said the league announced her retirement “with a tinge of sadness and deep gratitude,” calling Ackerman the strategic visionary who gave the re-founded conference the direction it needed to stand beside the power-football leagues. Her successor inherits a conference with a strong basketball identity, but also a tougher assignment: keep the Big East financially secure, culturally distinctive and nationally relevant as college sports keeps changing around it.