Val Ackerman, the BIG EAST, and Bringing Black Basketball History Back to Life
By Claude Johnson
For the past five NCAA basketball seasons, the BIG EAST Conference and the Black Fives Foundation have partnered during Black History Month to help bring the overlooked history of early African American basketball pioneers back into public view through conference games, storytelling, educational initiatives, social media campaigns, broadcasts, locker-room programming, and community engagement across all eleven member schools.
That partnership unfolded under the leadership of Hall of Famer and BIG EAST Commissioner Val Ackerman, who recently announced that she will retire later this year after more than a decade leading one of the most respected conferences in college basketball.
From the very beginning, Val understood the deeper significance of the work. In the conference’s 2022 announcement launching the initiative, she said:
“Our basketball-centric identity and commitment to diversity and inclusion creates an optimal conference-wide platform for our men’s and women’s basketball teams to honor the Black Fives Era and educate individuals on this significant time in Black history. This is an opportunity to celebrate pioneers in the member schools’ communities and to highlight their impact on the game of basketball and the community as a whole.”
As someone who has spent more than two decades uncovering and preserving the history of the Black Fives Era, I’ve spent the past several days reflecting not only on Val’s extraordinary impact on basketball itself, but also on the seriousness, imagination, and conviction with which she and the BIG EAST embraced this history from the very beginning.
The Black Fives were the all-Black basketball teams that existed across the United States before the racial integration of professional basketball. Their players, teams, coaches, owners, and communities helped shape the game itself, even as much of their history was neglected, buried, or forgotten over time.
What made the BIG EAST partnership so meaningful was that the conference never treated this history like a symbolic obligation or a performative exercise during Black History Month.
The BIG EAST treated this like it mattered.
Long before the Black Fives partnership, I knew Val from our years working on the same floor at NBA Properties during the 1990s. At the time, I was a junior employee just beginning my own journey in basketball, while Val was already one of the most respected figures in the sport, even before her eventual induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021 as a contributor.
Over the decades that followed, Val would go on to help shape the modern landscape of basketball through her leadership with the NBA, the WNBA, USA Basketball, and ultimately the BIG EAST Conference. What always stood out to me was not simply her stature within the game, but the seriousness and conviction with which she approached ideas that connected basketball to culture, education, and history.
That seriousness became visible immediately once the BIG EAST and Black Fives Foundation began working together in 2022.
This was not a one-time activation.
The conference integrated Black Fives storytelling across all eleven member schools through conference games, educational initiatives, arena messaging, social media campaigns, historical storytelling, videos, broadcasts, and community engagement efforts.
The Big East Conference is comprised of Georgetown, Creighton, Villanova, DePaul, Marquette, Providence, Xavier (Cincinnati), St. John’s, Seton Hall, Butler, and UConn.
One of the most visible and meaningful elements of the initiative became the Black Fives warm-up shirts worn by players throughout the conference during Black History Month each season. The shirts, which featured historically inspired Black Fives team names and logos connected to each school’s local basketball heritage, became an intrinsic and instrumental part of the program itself.
Every player wore them before games, during games on the bench, and after games heading back to the locker room. Each year brought a new design and unveiling, and players genuinely seemed excited by them. The warm-up shirts helped transform the history from something simply discussed into something publicly visible, wearable, contemporary, and alive.
That visibility mattered.
And importantly, the BIG EAST kept evolving the concept and making it better every year.
Coaches and staff also wore “Make History Now” buttons throughout the initiative, while historical team profiles were distributed directly into locker rooms. Student-athletes encountered this history not as distant museum material, but as something connected directly to the game they themselves were now playing.
That was powerful.
And it was authentic.
The BIG EAST footprint overlaps directly with many of the original geographies of Black basketball history itself: New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Newark, Hartford, Providence, Cincinnati, and beyond. The St. Christopher Club. The Washington Bears. The Philadelphia Tribune Girls. The Chicago Club Store Coeds. The Milwaukee Colored Panthers. The New Jersey Girls. The Hartford Tigerettes. The Alpha Physical Culture Club. And more. These are not just abstract places and abstract teams within the story of early Black basketball. They are central chapters of it.
Under Val’s leadership, the conference understood that connection.
The initiative also evolved meaningfully over time. Women’s basketball became increasingly integrated into the storytelling and visual identity of the program.
Coaches such as Shaka Smart and Geno Auriemma publicly reflected on the significance of the history. UConn national champion KK Arnold emerged as a Black Fives Ambassador for Education and Leadership, helping connect a new generation of athletes and fans to the pioneers who helped build the game long before them.
The conference never allowed the initiative to become stagnant. Every year, the programs deepened, expanded, and improved.
That evolution mattered.
In 2025, Val described the partnership this way:
“Their legacy inspires our athletes and communities, and we’re proud that the BIG EAST platform will be used to celebrate and elevate their impact in a meaningful way.”
The history of the Black Fives Era was already important. The pioneers already mattered. Their contributions to basketball and American history already deserved recognition.
What the BIG EAST helped do was restore visibility, energy, connection, and contemporary relevance to stories that had been neglected, buried, or overlooked.
As Dana O’Neil wrote in The Athletic:
“How did we miss this? How did we miss an entire chunk of history? We didn’t miss it, Johnson explains. We just didn’t look.”
That observation has stayed with me because it captures something essential about this work.
The stories were always there.
People simply stopped looking.
Over the past two decades, my own work with the Black Fives has grown far beyond research alone. What began as an effort to uncover forgotten pioneers evolved into archival preservation, exhibitions, educational initiatives, storytelling, public programming, institutional partnerships, apparel, media projects, and cultural engagement designed to help reconnect people emotionally with this history.
As the Black Fives Foundation often says, we seek to “bring the stories of the pioneers of the Black Fives Era back to life.”
The BIG EAST helped do exactly that.
And none of it happens without people who genuinely care.
I want to especially acknowledge Tracy Ellis-Ward, who helped originate the early vision for this partnership during her time at the BIG EAST before later joining Pacers Sports & Entertainment as Senior Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. I also want to recognize Nicole Early, Senior Associate Commissioner for Marketing and External Affairs, Jeff Poulard, Associate Commissioner for Compliance and Governance/Social Impact and Inclusion, longtime communications leader John Paquette, the conference leadership, athletic departments, communications teams, coaches, student-athletes, and everyone behind the scenes who continued strengthening the initiative year after year.
The public response demonstrated that this history still resonates deeply today.
Across five years of Black History Month programming, the BIG EAST and Black Fives partnership generated more than six million social media reach during the annual February campaign periods alone.
Notably, February 2026 produced the strongest engagement levels of the entire five-year initiative and the highest social reach since the partnership’s inaugural launch campaign in 2022.
But for me, the deeper impact cannot be measured entirely in metrics.
It was seeing this history move into arenas, broadcasts, classrooms, conversations, and basketball culture itself.
It was seeing players, coaches, administrators, broadcasters, students, and fans begin to understand that the story of basketball in America is larger, richer, and more interconnected than many people ever realized.
The conference never treated this history like an obligation.
They treated it like it mattered.
That is a credit to Val Ackerman’s leadership and to the culture she helped foster throughout the BIG EAST.
I’m deeply grateful for the partnership, the friendship, the trust, and the seriousness with which the conference embraced this work.
Most of all, I’m grateful that a new generation of basketball fans, players, and students now understands a little more clearly that the game they love was shaped by many pioneers whose stories deserve to be remembered, honored, and carried forward.
Thank you, Val.