About an hour before Xavier and Providence were set to play in the semifinals of the Big East men’s basketball tournament on Friday night, the league’s commissioner, Val Ackerman, was laughing at an old memory.
It was only four years earlier, but to her it felt distant. The conference, formed anew in 2013, had been renting office space from a law firm. Most of the staff still lived in Rhode Island, near the former headquarters.
There were concerns about little things, like setting up an email system, and big things, like the viability of a league that had proudly, and perhaps foolhardily, divorced itself from the athletic department A.