Associate Vice President For The WNBA Todd DeMoss Breaks Down Basketball Operations In Pro Sport

We are the department that deals with anything that has to do with the game or anything that occurs on the hardwood; that is our main responsibility.

That goes from developing, implementing, and policing standards that are laid out in our governing documents.

This includes the operations manual, rule book, and anything that the board of governors deems as important. It's our responsibility to monitor that and guide teams on how to stay within the parameters of those guidelines.

Mostly, a typical day consists of working at the league office.

We do travel quite a bit covering games and other events which involve our teams. We also cover live games during the season.

Presently, we're in our planning season, our offseason, which is a great deal of working at the office every day.

Right now at this juncture of the season, we're preparing for our draft which will occur in April.

We work with teams collecting data on prospective draftees and then we work on selecting roughly the top 10 or 12 individuals that we'll invite to draft.

3When was the point that you realized that you were meant to do this career and why you wanted a career in sports?

My degree is actually in sports medicine and I went from high school in to college at the University of Iowa studying Sports Medicine. Then, I took my first job as the Head Athletic Trainer of a minor league basketball team that started up in my home town.

So actually that's how I started in sports was from that side and working in minor league basketball especially in the '80's and early '90's it was very much a "mom-and-pop" and I was one of the few full time employees. Which team?

I had a lot of roles that went beyond just basketball and basketball operations. If the players were going to need food, I had to negotiate deals with restaurants.

If I had wanted the players housing I had to go and negotiate deals with apartment complexes and having those type of responsibilities led to more on the operations side and more on the sales side which progressed my career a great deal.

Again, once you start creating a business, revenue opens many doors open.

That led to being head of basketball operations to being a general manager to being a team president in different areas. Actually in the CBA during that times period, likewise it was a small business so not a whole lot of people traveled from team to team, city to city, market to market and having exposure to what the product really was like across the board.

After doing that for about 10 years, I had the opportunity of joining the CBA league office as the head of team services which at that time was helping the teams from a marketing, sales and ticket sales standpoint, which was a unique position and only from the standpoint of being able to have the relationships and the experiences in each market as a trainer lead me to those opportunities on the business side.

The great thing about sports is that no matter what kind of industry you're interested in, there's probably an avenue or an aspect of it in the sports entertainment industry in which you could apply those skills.

4When we think of operations, we tend to think that you're dealing with the facility on a more personal level. Describe the process in preparing the facility leading up to a major event?

A lot of what we do starts from day one.

Schedule and planning the the event. We must lay out the schedule within our league standards both in the operations manual and our facilities standards manual that we have guidelines that we work with each building to fall within those guidelines.

We also must ensure that we have consistency for our teams, players, coaches on their experience that they'll have in each building, market to market.

From an events standpoint, we have special events each year that we put on as a league office such as drafts, such as our all-star and play offs that we do have a little bit more engagement or guiding of how those events will go and that will go from things such as selecting the facilities, to negotiating the contracts with those facilities, to planning the player or the stakeholders travel, accommodations, food.

So from the experience of running with a team, it's always fun to go back and get away from behind a desk and actually put on events. The touch points we have with players and coaches that are a little bit less formal than what we have on a day to day standpoint.

So those are fun and definitely for our fans putting on events such as the draft and all-stars are things that people really enjoy and we enjoy doing as a staff.