Growing Up in Clarion Prepared Stacy McWilliams for Her Career as an Executive in the NBA and Now With the Los Angeles Lakers

NEW YORK (EYT/D9) — Growing up in Clarion, Stacy McWilliams was a typical teenager doing typical teenage things.

She hung out with friends. She had a passion for sports. She had supportive parents and an older sister she looked up to and admired.

She had dreams — big dreams — even though they weren’t completely fleshed out in her curious and ambitious mind.

McWilliams just knew she wanted to do something great.

(Pictured above, Clarion native Stacy McWilliams is now a high-ranking executive with the Los Angeles Lakers)

“I loved growing up in Clarion,” she said. “I had an incredible group of friends. We were busy having a good time and spending time together. I think I probably would have said I wanted to do something in sports, but I had no idea what that was. No idea.”

Little did she know at the time, but the 1989 graduate of Clarion Area High School would one day embark on a fascinating career that would take to her around the globe to places like Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Rome, London, Paris, Mexico City and many other points in between as an executive in the National Basketball Association.

That journey has now whisked her from the East Coast to the West Coast and to the Los Angeles Lakers — one of the most iconic teams in the NBA — where she is trailblazing in a new position created just for her as the executive director for global partnerships.

“I don’t even think when I was growing up in Clarion that I knew you could just go to work for the NBA,” McWilliams said, chuckling softly.

Beyond her knack for hard work, which helped drive her career forward, McWilliams’ true gift has been her ability to seize opportunities.

It’s a skill that was certainly nurtured by her parents, Robert McWilliams and Diana Jaggers.

She snatched her first opportunity in pro sports with the Hartford Blizzard in the American Basketball League out of graduate school at Smith College. She then landed with Madison Square Garden and parlayed that into a long career with the NBA before her fast-break to her next challenge.

Working for the Los Angeles Lakers.

It was a job she simply couldn’t pass up.

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The 1980s were a golden age for the NBA. Legendary teams in L.A., Boston, Philadelphia, and Houston reigned.

Pro basketball was also a prime source of some jovial ribbing in the McWilliams’ household.

Stacy McWilliams was a devout fan of the “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers; her father was one of the biggest supporters of the Boston Celtics. Those two teams formed one of the most legendary rivalries in all of sports.

“I grew up loving the Lakers,” she said. “One of my best childhood memories was the fact that my dad was a big Celtics fan and it was something we constantly debated. It was a great way for my dad and I to connect.”

McWilliams was raised in an athletic family. Her father was a gifted baseball player. Her sister, Sue, excelled in sports as well at Clarion. And McWilliams also shined in basketball, volleyball, and also ran track and field.

“Sports was one of those things embedded in our family,” McWilliams said. “It just was a part of the fabric of who I was.”

Now four decades later, McWilliams is working for the team she grew up cheering for.

It seems almost surreal to her now.

It was never something that was on her radar, she said.

“It wasn’t on my radar because the position didn’t even exist,” she said.

One of McWilliams’ crowning achievements during her time working as an executive in the NBA made her eventual move to the Lakers possible.

She worked in several roles during her two-plus decades in the association. That job took her all over the world and allowed her to pursue another of her joys.

“I love to travel,” she said. “It’s one of my passions in life and the fact that I was in a job that allowed me to do a lot of travel outside of the U.S. and explore new cultures and new places, I feel really lucky and grateful.

“I’m not overstating this,” she added. “I loved every day of my work at that company.”

McWilliams spent years spearheading an effort to expand the rights of franchises in the league to strike their own international deals.

It was a bold new policy and allowed teams to market themselves better internationally, where basketball — and the NBA in particular — was booming.

Now with the Lakers, McWilliams gets to implement the very thing she helped make possible.

“I’ve always known that they ran a really incredible business and that it’s obviously an iconic, global brand,” McWilliams said. “The last three or four years, I have been spending an enormous amount of time on a program we call the international team marketing program that was tasked in 2018, and then we expanded it a few years later. I spent a lot of time building that program. It’s essentially a rights program that for the first time ever gave our teams rights to market globally and internationally with certain partners who wanted to pay for those rights.

“The Lakers are one franchise that from the start knew it could be a game changer for them, and it was kind of that next opportunity to grow their business,” she added. “So when the Lakers first reached out, it was maybe the easiest decision I’ve ever really made professionally because it was a chance for me to take that rights program that I had in development and put it into place with our most iconic brand.”

McWilliams has only been on the job for two weeks. She still lives in Manhattan with her wife, Nicole Rabe; six-year-old son, Max; and newborn baby girl, Mila.

Eventually, they will head west. For now, McWilliams works remotely and has hit the ground running.

“L.A. was on the shortlist of places that I would live at this point in my life,” McWilliams said. “I have the option to head out now or work remote for a while, so I’m going to stay in New York for the moment with my family and I’ll be in L.A. once a month. There’s a lot of international travel as well, just depending on our partners. So it’s really at the moment the ideal scenario. Everything about it was the perfect fit.”

McWilliams’ career has been all about perfect fits.

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In 2011, the NBA was a very different league.

It was just scratching the surface on its global reach.

Yao Ming had put the NBA on the map in Asia with his long career in Houston, expanding interest in the league to new international markets.

The time was right to further that expansion and McWilliams wanted to take it on.

She spent nearly a year in Beijing in 2011 as the vice president of NBA China.

It was an eye-opening experience for McWilliams and laid the groundwork for the rest of her career in the NBA — and now with the Lakers.

(Stacy McWilliams with her wife, Nicole Rabe, and son, Max, in the countryside in Italy)

“There is such a basketball fandom in China. I just couldn’t believe it,” McWilliams said. “I couldn’t believe how people will eat up our game. I couldn’t believe the opportunity we had.

“I just felt an incredible kindness from people there who were so excited to have the NBA. I was there for close to a year and it changed my life. It changed how I viewed the world. It changed me as a human. I’m so grateful for it.”

When she returned, she had a new focus for what she wanted to accomplish.

“I sat down internally with a few people, and actually with our commissioner at the time (David Stern), and figured out what the role would look like being entirely focused internationally when I came back,” she said. “When I first came back, I was still primarily focused on China. And then it became pretty apparent quickly that I should broaden into other regions.”

McWilliams spent a lot of time on planes in the years that followed, globe-trotting from one international market to another.

Building the brand.

Her work paid off.

The NBA, which has always prided itself on its diversity, has had its interest blossom all over the world.

International players dot virtually every roster. The game has seen unprecedented popularity all over the globe.

And McWilliams was one of the people at the forefront of that movement.

“Part of the reason for the growth is that the NBA just makes tremendous efforts and has incredibly smart people who kind of look at what’s next,” she said. “Where can we put a foot in the ground? Where should we be? Where can we touch communities? Where can we make an impact? The NBA is brilliant at that. There are places I go where I can’t believe the jerseys I see floating around. Over the years, basketball continues to climb, climb, climb.”

So does McWilliams. That first rung was in Clarion.

‘BE A GOOD HUMAN’

Something McWilliams’ father said has stuck with McWilliams throughout her life.

“Work hard and be a good human.”

It’s simple. Elegant. To the point.

And something she lives by to this day.

“Those are two things that I’ve just carried with me,” she said.

That attitude was rooted in a small town.

Clarion has never left her blood.

“I’m not even sure you realize it when you’re a kid growing up in a town like Clarion — that it’s a town that allows for you to dream big dreams,” she said. “I’m really grateful for all of that.

“Growing up, you’re playing all these sports and you just naturally work hard and you want to be great. You dream about winning. You dream of greatness. I was lucky growing up in Clarion with a small class and supportive friends and that just becomes embedded in who you are.”

McWilliams was very close with her father. He died in November of 2018 after a battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).

But the life lessons he taught her still resonate and made her who she is now, both in her professional and personal life.

“My dad was a pretty incredible guy,” McWilliams said. “I wrote my own kind of eulogy for him when he died, and I remember writing down the things he taught me about just being a human. I have these memories of my dad, who was the type of guy who when you walked into a room, he’s gonna stand up and he’s gonna shake your hand. He’s going to ask how your day is going and he’s gonna offer you a drink, regardless of what’s happening in his life. I just remembered at that time all these things that kind of made me who I am. That’s my dad.”

It set her on her journey, first in Hartford, then at Madison Square Garden, and then to the first of her dream jobs with the NBA.

Now, she finds she’s hit the jackpot again in another dream job with the Lakers in what has been a whirlwind few months for McWilliams and her family.

“(Nicole and I) joke about it,” McWilliams said, laughing. “It’s like, ‘Wow. New job. New city. New baby.

“Nicole and I had just started talking about what’s next? We have two children who are growing up and do we want to start thinking about places that give them a little more space, mountains, water, whatever?”

(Stacy and Nicole at the Diamond Beach in Iceland)

Family has always been McWilliams’ touchstone.

Her sister, Sue Dougherty, lives in New Bethlehem. Her nephew and godson is Jake Dougherty, who is well known in Redbank Valley athletics, first as one of the best quarterbacks to ever play for the Bulldogs and now an assistant boys basketball coach.

Sue was a longtime teacher at Redbank.

“I’ve always looked up to her,” McWilliams said. “She created the perfect life for herself. She always wanted to be a teacher. I’ve just always admired her.”

With family her rock, it helped McWilliams navigate the sometimes turbulent waters of being a woman in a male-dominated business.

“Not as much in New York, but in other places,” McWilliams said. “In other places, I was literally the only woman there.

“I just did my work because I love what I was doing and I always felt tremendously respected with the NBA as an organization.”

The NBA nominated McWilliams for a prestigious honor as Outsports Power 100 most influential LGBTQ people in sports in 2023.

She was No. 48 on that powerhouse list that includes Steve Kornacki (No. 66), Candace Parker (No. 12), Carl Nassib (No. 7), Megan Rapinoe (No. 2) and Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss (No. 1).

“It’s an interesting thing. I’ve never been someone who sought recognition of that type of thing,” McWilliams said. “It’s not really something I give a whole lot of thought to, but it’s another one of those things that I have to remember that representation does matter and it is important for other people and their kids to see that. So I think for that reason I felt honored.”

McWilliams has always been open about her sexuality.

“It’s part of who I am. I’m very open. I mean, I talk all the time about my wife and my family,” she said. “Again I like to give my parents credit for this. I have always been instilled with this confidence about myself that I am who I am, whether it is my career, or my life, or who my partner is, who my family is. I have confidence in who I am. I don’t even think twice about it.”

McWilliams and Rabe began dating in 2013 and were married in Rome in 2016.

It was what McWilliams called a perfect wedding.

And now she has the perfect blend in her career.

“There’s so much potential and opportunity,” she said. “I’m just really excited for what the future holds.”