Candace Parker Is Building the Bridge She Wishes She’d Had

Retirement is a word that gets used loosely in sports. For most professional athletes, it does not mean the end of ambition or drive or purpose. It means those things now need to find a new direction — and the infrastructure to help with that transition has historically been almost nonexistent.

That gap is what the Pro Athlete Community was built to address. And last November, Candace Parker took a seat at the center of it.

Parker was named Co-Chair of PAC’s Board of Advisors in November 2025, becoming the first woman to hold that position in the organization’s history. She joins Devin and Jason McCourty — former NFL players, Super Bowl champions, and broadcasters — as the leadership anchoring the board. Her role is not ceremonial. She is directly involved in shaping how PAC grows, who it reaches, and what it prioritizes for athletes navigating life after competition.

What PAC Is

The Pro Athlete Community was founded in 2022 around a straightforward premise: professional athletes need a dedicated infrastructure for life after sports, and no one had built it yet. PAC is a first-of-its-kind network of more than 1,600 professional athletes drawn from the NBA, WNBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS, and PGA — all connected through a platform designed to help them transition competitive drive into new careers, ventures, and purpose.

The organization provides access to top-tier business education, mentorship from industry leaders, and investment opportunities. It describes its mission as connecting the biggest talent in sports with the brightest minds in business. The board of advisors reads accordingly — alongside Parker and the McCourty twins sit names from across the professional sports landscape, including Terron Armstead, Ndamukong Suh, Devon Kennard, and Julius Thomas.

The network has been growing steadily. A recent partnership with the United Football Players Association brought all UFPA members into PAC’s community through the end of 2026. The organization is now embedded in multiple leagues and is actively expanding its presence in women’s sports — which is where Parker’s role becomes most significant.

Why Parker, Why Now

When PAC made the decision to bring Parker on as Co-Chair, the timing was deliberate. Women’s sports are in the middle of the most significant commercial and cultural expansion in their history. The WNBA’s audience, sponsorship activity, and valuation have all moved dramatically over the past three years. More female athletes than ever before are entering professional sports with business ambitions that extend well beyond their playing careers.

The problem is that most of the existing infrastructure for post-playing career support was built by men, for men, in the sports that dominated professional athletics for decades. PAC recognized the gap. Parker is the mechanism for closing it.

As Co-Chair, her primary mandate is to increase access and equal representation for women athletes within PAC’s network — ensuring that the organization’s resources, deal flow, and mentorship opportunities reflect the full scope of professional sport, not just the historically dominant corners of it.

Parker spoke directly to why the role resonated: “For many professional athletes, retirement marks the start of a brand-new chapter — one that can be full of opportunity, growth, and reinvention.” That framing is personal. She navigated her own transition from the court and understands what it feels like to have built an identity around competition and then be asked to build a new one without a roadmap.

What She Has Built Post-Retirement

Parker retired from the WNBA in 2023 after 16 seasons. She is a three-time champion, two-time MVP, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and one of the most complete players the sport has ever produced. The basketball legacy is settled.

What she has built since is worth examining on its own terms. Parker joined Turner Sports as an NBA analyst — a role she has grown into as one of the most credible and articulate voices in basketball broadcasting. She holds an equity stake in the Chicago Sky, the franchise where she won her second championship. She has been involved in multiple investment and media ventures and has been vocal about the importance of women athletes being taken seriously as business people, not just as spokespeople.

The PAC Co-Chair role adds a structural dimension to all of that. Parker is not just building her own post-playing career. She is now helping shape the infrastructure that the next generation of athletes will use to build theirs.

The Bigger Picture

The parallel to what Richard Sherman and Sheldon Day built with The Players Company is direct. Both are athlete-led efforts to solve the same fundamental problem — that professional athletes have historically been poorly served in the transition out of sport, and that the people best positioned to fix that are the ones who have lived it.

What Parker brings that is distinct is her standing in women’s sports at a moment when the conversation around women athletes as business builders is louder than it has ever been. She is not walking into an established system. She is helping redesign one at exactly the right moment.

That is the version of athlete leadership PTV has always been interested in — not the jersey, not the endorsement, but the decision to use what you have built to make the path easier for the people coming up behind you.