‘More to give.’ She built Fever from ground up, returned to rebuild them back into a winner

INDIANAPOLIS – Kelly Krauskopf and Mel Raines sat for drinks last fall, talking about Indiana Fever‘s future.

At the time, Raines, Pacers Sports and Entertainment CEO, was asking Krauskopf, then the assistant Pacers general manager, for advice. After all, who better to ask than the architect of the Fever franchise?

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Krauskopf had built the Fever from the ground up, serving as the president and general manager from 2000-18 before moving across the street to work in the Pacers front office.

Allison Barber served as the Fever’s president for the six years after Krauskopf left, then she decided to step down to become the chair of the Marvella Foundation. Lin Dunn, the Fever’s general manager at the time, was also hoping to move out of such a forward-facing role and return to semi-retirement.

So, tasked with the job of finding a new franchise leader and restructuring the front office in a pivotal time in the WNBA, Raines and Krauskopf talked about the job: What kind of person should they be looking for in a new president? What qualities should they have? How should the position be structured?

Working through it together, Raines saw something light up in Krauskopf.

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“Through the process of talking about it with me and talking about possible people and how it could be structured, I just noticed she would get more and more excited,” Raines said.

Knowing she found someone who would be a perfect fit already, Raines took a chance.

“I just blurted out — I think we might have been having drinks somewhere — I said, ‘Do you want this job?’” Raines recalled of how she recruited Krauskopf. “She went, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, my dream is for you to take this job.’”

Krauskopf was the obvious choice. She knew the league inside and out, had decades of experience between the league office, Fever front office and Pacers front office, and is one of the most highly regarded executives in the WNBA.

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She had taken a detour out of the women’s basketball world for six years. In Dunn’s eyes, it was time for Krauskopf to come home.

“We recruited her. We sold her,” Dunn said. “I told her it was in her best interest at this time in her career to come home, and I think she, at first, was kind of caught off guard, then the next thing we know, she’s seriously considering it. Then the next thing I know, hallelujah, she’s coming home.”

For a while, Krauskopf thought her time in women’s sports was something she had moved on from.

But in her conversations with Raines and Dunn, she realized she had more to give. More than anything, she wanted to give back to the franchise that gave her everything.

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“At this point in my career, I have more years behind me than I have ahead of me,” siad Krauskopf, 63. “… this is really my DNA. The WNBA is part of who I am. And it really raised me in my basketball career. So I felt like there’s more to give.”

How Kelly Krauskopf built the Indiana Fever

For the longest time, Krauskopf had a sign on her desk that read “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” That’s something the longtime executive needed to embody as she played sports in the pre-Title IX era.

A native of Corpus Christi, Texas, Krauskopf first played at Stephen F. Austin, then became a three-year letterwinner at Texas A&M. Playing basketball in the 1980s, she didn’t necessarily have the necessities women’s athletes do now.

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“We had this tiny locker room that we had to paint ourselves, the worst practice times where it could be 6 a.m. before an eight o’clock class, because the guys had it after. I mean, you name it,” Krauskopf said. “We drove in vans everywhere, we wore the same exact uniform every year for three years… it was a different time.”

Those experiences, those inequities are what drove her to become an executive in women’s sports. Women’s sports, and women, are worth more than to be treated as an afterthought.

“It definitely is part of my foundation of wanting things to be better for women,” Krauskopf said. “…. you’re always pushing, and pushing and pushing to be at this point where we are today, where our home opener is a standing-room only event, and 41 nationally televised games to selling out arenas all over the place. It’s what we had envisioned, all of us that had been working in the sport for all these years.”

Krauskopf started her career in the office of the Southwest Conference, working her way up to assistant commissioner in six years. She then worked for Liberty Sports Media, which was owned by the Fox Networks, where she met Val Ackerman, the person who would become the WNBA’s first commissioner.

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A few years later, Ackerman called her, asking her to take a job with what was an upstart WNBA league office as the director of operations. Krauskopf was tasked with managing the eight teams that originated the WNBA, including signing players, assigning them to teams and developing a schedule for the league.

Then, she got a call from someone in Donnie Walsh’s office. Walsh was the Pacers’ longtime president and CEO, and in 2000, he was tasked with building a team to bring the WNBA to Indianapolis.

And he wanted Krauskopf to run it.

“I give Donnie Walsh all the credit,” Krauskopf said. “Because he said to me, ‘Kelly, I don’t know the women’s basketball world like you know the women’s basketball world.’ I had come from the league office. I knew all the players in the league, and he’s like, ‘I need somebody that understands, I’m not just going to put a guy in this job that has no experience in women’s basketball. It’s really important to me. You have to find the people that will run with you and help you.’ And I give him credit, because not all the teams did that.”

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Krauskopf took on the challenge. She was the first Indiana Fever employee, tasked with building a team from the ground up. She garnered excitement in a time where women’s basketball was an afterthought, picking up 5,000 season ticket deposits before the Fever even played a game.

She built a team from scratch, with current head coach Stephanie White being the first player on the roster. She took a chance on Tamika Catchings, who tore her ACL in her final college season, in the 2001 WNBA draft, and she turned into an unrivaled franchise player and the only MVP in Fever history.

In the first 18 years Krauskopf was president, the Fever went to the playoffs 13 times, the WNBA Finals three times and won the 2012 championship.

She became revered as one of the best executives in the league, someone who knew the ins and outs of the league like the back of her hand. She was the architect of an entire professional sports franchise — a feat very few get on their resume.

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Eventually, she wanted something new.

Moving across the street

When 2018 rolled around, Krauskopf felt stuck, in a way.

She felt like she did everything she needed to do on the women’s side — she built a successful franchise from scratch, drafted a generational player in Catchings, won a championship and got the Fever to a sound financial position.

She was looking for a new challenge, and Pacers president Kevin Pritchard offered her one.

“We were at the Pacers Foundation golf tournament, and he was like, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about working for an NBA team? Would you ever think about working with us?’” Krauskopf said. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I was sort of going into that (2018 Fever season) thinking, you know, I’m trying to figure out what’s next. I felt like it was time to go ahead and turn the keys over to someone else.”

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So, following the Fever’s 2018 season, Krauskopf moved across Delaware Avenue to become an assistant GM for the Pacers.

It was a completely different world over there; a world where players are negotiating in millions, not thousands. There were more players — 15 roster spots, an entire G League team — to manage. There were the complexities of a soft salary cap, and the opportunities and limitations that come along with it.

But in negotiating those contracts and keeping up with the nuances of the NBA, Krauskopf always gravitated toward the same thing.

“I think for me, just really honing in on it helped me clarify kind of what I always knew inside, but more like what I like about players,” Krauskopf said. “I would always gravitate towards, when we would talk about players on the Pacers side, I would always gravitate towards the DNA pieces … that are super competitive, because I think your talents — you’re here for a reason, because they’re talented. Now, what separates you? And what separates you is character.”

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That kind of mindset is something she solidified in her six years with the Pacers. And something she brought back to the Fever when she returned to the presidency.

Krauskopf knows she has more to give to the franchise, to the sport of women’s basketball in general.

She saw firsthand how the popularity grew over the decades, eventually resulting in sold-out arenas, record TV ratings and lucrative media deals. Then, she watched from afar as the Fever exploded in popularity after Caitlin Clark was drafted in 2024.

Now, she wants to help the Fever get back to their championship aspirations.

“My reason for returning was as much about finding ways to give even more,” Krauskopf said. “You know, I knew I had more to give. Building it those early years was a source of pride for me, because while nobody was paying attention, we were digging in and trying to keep the ball moving and trying to keep it going.”

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‘The best architect in the WNBA’

Krauskopf returning to the Fever, 25 years after she helped to found the team, quickly became a full circle moment: her first act as president in her return was to hire a player on the inaugural Fever roster as the team’s head coach

Krauskopf picked Stephanie White as the No. 8 pick in the 2000 expansion draft, bringing her back to her home state after one year with the Charlotte Sting. Krauskopf and White have decades of history, as White first played in a Fever uniform, then rose through the coaching ranks as an assistant on the 2012 championship team and head coach from 2014-15.

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“It has been such an experience with this franchise for nearly 25 years from day one,” White said in her introductory news conference. “And the opportunity to come home and to lead this young, exciting, talented team, to work with Kelly again, who is, you know, the best architect in the WNBA and has put together championship teams year in and year out.”

The Fever front office, which includes Krauskopf and general manager Amber Cox, put together a roster ]they thought could make a splash in the WNBA. That included coring and re-signing Kelsey Mitchell, a fixture of the Fever, and signing marquee players in DeWanna Bonner and Natasha Howard.

The Fever were considered one of the best teams to utilize free agency in the offseason; a team that, just three years into a full-scale rebuild, could jump into championship contention.

But things didn’t work out the way they planned.

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Bonner left the team after just nine games because she didn’t feel like she could fit on the roster, and she was eventually waived. Clark, the player the front office built around, has been injured for half the season with four separate muscle injuries. Sophie Cunningham had two ankle injuries between training camp and the first few weeks of the season, delaying her integration into the rotation.

Still, Indiana is just coming out of a rebuild. Its core of No. 1 picks, Clark and 2023 top pick Aliyah Boston, are still learning and growing in the league.

Their potential, too, can be limitless. And that’s what Krauskopf hopes to build around.

“That continuity of a group of players that you continue to build around, and, you know, getting a structure, core values and culture built in, I think it’s really important,” Krauskopf said. “So I could see that (the previous front office) had a good start. I mean, you have to have some bad years to get to No. 1s in a row. So, you know, coming out of that and seeing that there’s an opportunity to really set it up and with these two foundational players.”

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Chloe Peterson is the Indiana Fever beat reporter for IndyStar. Reach her at capeterson@gannett.com or follow her on X at @chloepeterson67. Get IndyStar’s Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark coverage sent directly to your inbox with our Caitlin Clark Fever newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Kelly Krauskopf built Fever from ground up, tasked now with rebuilding