ATLANTA — She is not from a basketball background or even from a basketball family. She wasn’t a cheerleader either. But you would never know it from watching Ashley Preisinger, CEO of the WNBA's Atlanta Dream, go about her job.
“Go Dream!” she said with a level of volume and enthusiasm that echoed off the concrete walls of Philips Arena as she marched purposefully from one meeting to another. One might have thought the home team was winning in the fourth quarter given the gusto of Preisinger’s cheers and the spring in her step.
In fact, she won’t see her first game as CEO until May 25. For now Preisinger is, as she put it, “at the stage where I don’t know what I don’t know.”
What Preisinger lacks in basketball knowledge she makes up for with business savvy and boundless energy. An executive with Investco for more than a decade, she was approached last summer by an executive recruiter who thought her outside perspective would work perfectly in the sixth year of Atlanta’s WNBA team.
“I can honestly say that being the CEO of a basketball team never crossed my mind,” she said. “With Investco I had run various parts of a big company and I realized that there are a lot of the same elements here, but you have a sports overlay, which makes it more fun.”
What she does know is her market. An Atlanta resident for 20 years with her husband Mark, a Coca Cola executive, Preisinger grew up 60 miles north of Atlanta in the tiny mountain town of Jasper where her grandfather and great uncle were, for many years, the only doctors in town.
“When I was really young I used to see people show up at Papa’s house with chickens and apple pies and calves, and I had no idea what they were doing,” she said. “It wasn’t until he died in 1986 that I realized those people were paying him for medical services.”
Her father was also a surgeon in Jasper and her mother, who didn’t start law school until age 30, became a judge.
“It’s their example – their hard work – that I’ve always carried with me,” she said.
Preisinger now devotes all her energy to promoting her team and changing perceptions about the WNBA in general.
“People have this pre-conceived notion that they don’t like women’s basketball,” she said. “But when you pull on that thread a little bit, you find out that they’ve never seen a game. They’ve got their arms around the NBA, but they don’t think they will like the women’s game. Yet, when we get people to try our product, our net promoter scores are incredibly high from everybody: old, young, male, female. The reaction is, ‘Hey this is really fun.’”
Having been on the job only eight months, her personal experiences are still small, but she thinks she knows where the problems lie and what she needs to do to fix them.
“No doubt our biggest problem is perception,” she said. “I know so many men from being involved in financial services for so many years, and many of them are like, ‘What has Ashley gone and done now?’ So, they started watching women’s basketball, and now I’m getting all these calls from men saying, ‘Wow, it’s really fast-paced and physical.’”
That reaction is not uncommon.
But Preisinger sees another opportunity to attract a male audience to the women’s game.
“It’s fast; it’s fun, and a lot of men can relate to it, because women run plays that you can follow, which is the kind of basketball most people grew up playing,” she said. “I have a lot of coaches of young men who tell me that when they’re showing film to their teams, they want to show the WNBA because it emphasizes the fundaments.”
It’s a marvelous pitch, one that makes the Dream sound like the best night out in a town full of sporting options.
“We have six Sunday games this year that start at 3:00 p.m.,” she said. “That’s a perfect time for families to come out after church or a great time for a daddy-daughter outing. I know that around age 11, 12, or 13, it gets harder for dads to connect with their daughters, so this is a great opportunity for them to come out and enjoy some time together over basketball.”
On that front Preisinger speaks from personal experience.
Her oldest daughter is 13.
“Our oldest came to us and said she wanted to play basketball, but I was concerned because by seventh grade, basketball is a cut sport,” she said. “After three days of tryouts she made the team. I was so proud of her. But then the first words out of her mouth were, ‘Mom, have you told (Atlanta Dream player) Armintie (Herrington) and (L.A. Sparks guard) Lindsay (Harding)?
“At first I laughed."
But then Preisinger made the best sales pitch of them all.
“As a mom, I would much rather my daughter look up to Lindsay Harding than Lindsay Lohan.”
Who can argue with that?
