Team USA will welcome Seattle Storm star Sue Bird and Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant to the federation’s board of directors and retired Gen. Martin Dempsey as the chairperson of USA basketball.
Dempsey served as the U.S. Army Chief of Staff and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama.
He is the second person to be re-elected for back-to-back Olympic Cycles, following in Jerry Colangelo’s footsteps.
Dempsey will remain in the role through the 2024 Paris Olympics.
He mentioned how proud of Team USA he was and called USAB’s run a “remarkable success,” including the team’s gold medals in basketball, women’s basketball, and women’s 3×3 at the Tokyo games.
“We remain unflinchingly and enthusiastically committed to winning and rededicate ourselves to representing our country with honor in international competition,” Dempsey said.
Durant and Bird are among five athlete representatives selected.
The board consists of all gold medalists.
For this cycle, the number of people on the board was expanded from 11 to 15 people.
Alongside Bird and Durant, Team USA also added Seimone Augusts, Jennifer Azzi, and current NBA player Harrison Barnes.
The other new board member additions include WNBA head of league operations Bethany Donaphin, West Coast Conference commissioner Gloria Nevarez, National Federation of State High School Associations executive director Karissa Niehoff, and John Rogers Jr., the chairman and co-CEO of Ariel Investments.
The remaining Team USA board members are holdovers from the most recent Olympic cycle, including NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum, NBA senior vice president of international operations Kim Bohuny, NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt, Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir, and Texas executive senior associate athletics director Chris Plonsky.