Buffalo, NY - Six suitors sought Keia Clarke to play basketball circa 1998. Three were Ivy League: Yale, Princeton, and Brown. She chose Canisius.
Now Clarke is an incoming member of the university's Board of Trustees. And she'll happily tell you that she made the right decision back then, even if her mother wasn't so sure at the time.
"I chose the school she probably didn't want me to choose," Clarke says, "but what she said to me was I had to be there for four years, and I needed to choose the place that I felt was right for me."
Clarke is CEO of the New York Liberty, flagship franchise of the WNBA. Chief execs and college trustees have this in common: Both gigs call for uncommon leadership.
"I'm super excited and really humbled," Clarke says, "to have been asked to serve at the school where I got so much of my start not just in sports, but in life."
She was Keia McFadden when she came for her campus visit at 17. Now, at 45, she and her husband, Brian Clarke, have a daughter, Avery, and a son, Gavin.
Her other baby is the Liberty. She has worked for the team for 16 years, moving up from an entry-level position in marketing to director of marketing to vice president of business development to COO — and, in 2020, to CEO.
Clarke led the franchise from its former home in Westchester County to the big time of the Barclay Center, in Brooklyn — and then to the Liberty's first WNBA championship. (The team is in contention for a playoff spot in the 2026 postseason, which ends in October.)
That 2024 championship represented "the culmination of years of structural investment, strategic discipline, and cultural clarity," she wrote in a first-person piece for Time magazine. "...We are now entering the era of generational fandom. Children are growing up with Liberty gear next to Yankees caps."
Clarke grew up in Connecticut — 20 minutes from Yale, one reason she didn't want to go there — and majored in marketing at Canisius with the idea that she'd go back to her home state to work in the insurance business.
"I knew I wanted to work in corporate spaces for Fortune 500 companies," she says. "Really, that's the career path I saw in front of me. But it just so happens I was also a basketball player at Canisius, and I couldn't shake the itch for sports once I finished there."
She graduated from Canisius in 2003 and enrolled at New York University, where she earned a master's degree in sports business with a 30-page thesis on WNBA marketing. If a women's basketball junkie such as herself had never seen a game in person, she asked, what was wrong with the league’s approach?
"I was pointing out a shortfall of marketing attention, of distribution, of awareness that existed at that time in the WNBA," Clarke says. "I sit here today super proud to know that so much of what I was really critical of back then, I've actually had the privilege of being a part of changing."
She got an A on that paper. Then Michelle Collins, who had been one of her assistant coaches at Canisius, arranged for Clarke to present her thesis to leaders in the league office. Three months later, the WNBA hired her as a marketing conduit for all of its teams.
What Clarke really wanted, though, was a team of her own — and when the Liberty came calling, she jumped at the chance.
The WNBA was born from the boom of women's basketball at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, in Atlanta, where the U.S. team, coached by Buffalo's own Tara VanDerveer, fast-breaked to gold. Clarke was 15 and smitten by this women's Dream Team; she recorded all their games on VHS tapes.
But she wasn't interested in marketing basketball then; she was totally into playing it. In addition to Yale, Princeton, and Brown, she got recruiting interest from Northeastern and Boston universities.
In the end, though, "Canisius was the place that I felt was right for me," she says. "I had the most amazing official visit. Canisius represented family to me, and I knew early on that I would be nurtured, I would be supported, and that's how it played out."
Growing up in Connecticut, she had never heard of Juneteenth. She discovered it at the annual celebration in Buffalo.
"I chose Buffalo because of its diversity," Clarke says. "And I really felt that how I engaged outside of the classroom and off the basketball court within the city, within the community, were really important pieces for me in my growth as an adult and who I was becoming as a person, to be able to connect my life as an athlete, as a student, but also culturally."
Clarke started at point guard in her last two seasons. She sees a connection between playing point and being a CEO: One must have vision on the court, and the other be a visionary off of it.
"There's definitely connective tissue between my life as an athlete and my life as a business leader," she says. "I wasn't a hall of famer or a standout athlete at Canisius, but I was a tried-and-true teammate."
Clarke keeps up with several former teammates, including Shauna Green, now head coach at the University of Illinois. (As Shauna Geronzin, she scored 2,012 career points at Canisius, still the most in the history of its women's program.)
"All of the things that came along with me being an athlete are the reasons why I'm able to actually operate a franchise," Clarke says. "Although I didn't get to play professionally, I learned about character building and resiliency and time management."
The 15-year-old girl who loved that 1996 women's Olympic team now has a Liberty roster loaded with Olympians. Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu played key roles in the USA's winning gold at the 2024 Paris Games, where several other Liberty players competed for other countries.
Stewart and Ionescu played key roles, too, in the Liberty's five-game championship series win against the Minnesota Lynx that came not long after those Olympics.
"Many people work in this league, and work in leagues across pro sports, and never get a chance to win a championship," Clarke says. "Truly a dream come true for me and, honestly, for my family."
She has that ring plus too many other honors to count. Among them: Essence magazine named her CEO of the year in 2025 for "industry-shaping leadership and cultural impact." CNBC named her to its inaugural list of Changemakers in 2024. And Sports Business Journal named her to its Game Changers Class of 2023.
The woman who earned a marketing degree at Canisius is now a marketing star in the nation's biggest market. And soon she'll be a member of the board that is in charge of the alma mater she loves.
"It is a full circle moment for me, truly," Clarke says. "Those four years in Buffalo at Canisius were so pivotal for me. So, really, it's a feeling of gratitude, quite honestly, and a feeling of great responsibility that I don't take lightly to be appointed to help guide decisions that will shape the experience for the next generation of students the same way that it did for me."
By the way, a few years ago Clarke earned a certificate from Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program.
The Ivies finally got her.
But the Griffs get to keep her.
