How to become a WNBA executive, explained by a WNBA executive

For Brooklyn Cartwright — Atlanta Dream’s newly-promoted assistant general manager — it’s all about showing the next generation of Black women what the pathway toward a career in a WNBA front office looks like.

For Atlanta Dream assistant general manager Brooklyn Cartwright, basketball wasn’t love at first sight.

“I hated it. I didn’t want anything to do with it,” Cartwright told SB Nation, then added with a smile: “I’m an only child. I don’t love anything I’m not immediately good at.”

But the summer after she turned 14, her father, a longtime basketball coach, started leading her in daily workouts as soon as he got home from work. She got a lot better “really quickly” and rapidly fell in love with the sport, ultimately playing four years of high school varsity basketball.

But what happens when you fall in love with a sport but still aren’t talented enough to make it a career? Nearly all high school athletes find themselves in that gray zone, and have to hang it up — and simply become avid sports fans instead.

But Cartwright wanted to be around the game, and badly.

So, she did everything she could to remain close to it even after her high school career ended. While she got interest from Division II and III schools, her parents urged her to go to a more well-known school nearby. So, she enrolled in Georgia Southern.

As a freshman on campus, Cartwright was eager to find a community to be a part of. So, she went with what she knew — and became a manager for the school’s women’s basketball team. It happened fast; at the beginning of her freshman year, she saw a kid walking by with a team manager T-shirt, sent out some emails, and got the gig.

“I didn’t even know it was something you could do,” Cartwright said.

After a lot of hard work, what first started as a volunteer gig became one of the highest-ranking front-office jobs in professional women’s basketball.

And, as she’s risen through the ranks, Cartwright has recognized that she’s helping to pave a pathway that other young girls in her position could follow.

How to go from a team manager to a high-ranking WNBA executive

College students across the country serve as team managers for their schools’ basketball programs, and one of Cartwright’s goals is to help demonstrate to those students how that experience can ultimately turn into a career in pro sports.

As a freshman, she realized that the college team manager role entailed far greater responsibilities than she initially envisioned. From the start, she was constantly in the coaches’ office, getting involved with whatever she could, whether that was assembling itineraries for trips, or spending time in the film room.

At the beginning of her senior of college, she realized she couldn’t picture a life away from basketball, so she put all of her energy into finding a collegiate coaching job.

“I just drafted an email, and I kid you not — I sent the email to every Division I, Division II, Division III, college coach in Georgia or any state that touched Georgia — any state that sounded cool. I built a database,” Cartwright said. “I literally built the database by hand, which is crazy, and I just blasted my stuff out to whoever would look at it.”

Eventually, she was hired as an assistant coach at Lenoir-Rhyne University — and subsequently served as an assistant coach for four seasons, across three colleges. She realized after those early years of coaching that the front office was a better fit, so after stepping away from basketball for a few years to tend to family matters when it was time to re-enter the basketball world, she searched patiently for the perfect opportunity.

In 2021, that opportunity came along, and Cartwright — who by now had years of both coaching and operations experience under her belt — applied for the Director of Basketball Operations role at the Atlanta Dream.

For Brooklyn Cartwright, it’s all about inspiring and representing

She worked her way up the Dream front office over the past 4 years and is now general manager Dan Padover’s top assistant. Her responsibilities are far-reaching — she works on communications and marketing, daily operations, player recruitment, and more.

“He’s really given me the opportunity to weigh in on a wide array of topics,” she said. “Free agency is a huge one. The draft is a huge one. Those are things that we kind of just mull over, things that that he and I are always lockstep on, and we’re just always making sure that we really work as a team, and that both of our opinions are weighed in on the decisions that we’re making.”

Eventually, Cartwright would love to be a general manager of a WNBA team. But for now, she’s just thrilled to be a part of the Dream organization.

“People are always laughing at me because I’m always like, ‘I love it here. You’ll have to drag me out kicking and screaming,’” Cartwright said.

As she rises up in the ranks, she’s motivated by the opportunity to inspire other Black women who want to be in a WNBA front office — and recognizes that she plays a part in the massive swing toward representation across WNBA front offices.

Five WNBA teams have male general managers: the Dallas Wings (Curt Miller), Atlanta Dream (Dan Padover), New York Liberty (Jonathan Kolb), Chicago Sky (Jeff Pagliocca), and Phoenix Mercury (Nick U’Ren), while seven have a female one: Connecticut Sun (Morgan Tuck), Los Angeles Sparks (Raegan Pebley, Washington Mystics (Jamila Wideman), Toronto Tempo (Monica Wright), Indiana Fever (Amber Cox), Seattle Storm (Talisa Rhea), and Golden State Valkyries (Ohemaa Nyanin). Four of those general managers — Tuck, Pebley, Wideman, and Wrights — are former WNBA players.

Cartwright wants to ultimately join that growing list of women general managers.

“For me, it’s about representation, right? Being able to be a Black woman amongst a league of other Black women, and really achieve at the highest level,” she said. “Being a GM is certainly my ultimate goal, and that’s what I’m striving toward every day. I’m growing and learning more about how that works.”

Cartwright remembers when she was a teenage girl who loved basketball and just wanted to make it a career, but didn’t quite know how to do it.

So, as she recruits free agents to Atlanta, prepares for the upcoming 2025 WNBA draft, and makes management decisions at the highest level, she understands the impact her presence in such a high-ranking front office position can have on other young girls who love the sport.

“It’s really about serving as a beacon of light for people like myself who are coming up through the ranks,” she said. “There’s a manager out there somewhere who wants to do what I do, and they don’t even know it yet. To be able to look at publications like yours and see someone like me doing it that maybe looks like them, or comes from a similar story, or from where they come from, that’s what’s really important to me. That’s why I do what I do.”