Atlanta Hawks promote G Leaguer to VP role
The new job makes Tori Miller one of the NBA's highest-ranking women working in a front office.
The Atlanta Hawks have promoted its G League College Park GM Tori Miller to a vice president position with the Hawks, making her one of the NBA’s highest-ranking women working in a front office, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
In her capacity as Vice President, Player Personnel/Basketball Intelligence, Miller’s duties will extend to scouting, starting as early as the 2023 NBA draft.
She had been in the Skyhawks’ office as GM since July 2020 and was the first Black American woman to hold that position in the organization, according to The Atlanta Voice.
“When I was first named to the position, it didn’t really hit me until I sat back and I saw all of the feedback that I was getting, all of the outpour of love and support from young girls,” Miller told The Voice in January. “It feels good to be the first, but it feels even better to know that I won’t be the last.”
Miller, a graduate of the University of Miami School of Business, previously worked as an intern for the Suns from 2014 to 2016, according to The AJC.
Asked during a Twitter interview earlier this week for her advice to those who aspire to work in sports management, Miller said, “Trust yourself. Trust your work” and for women, in particular, to not “be afraid of the word ‘no’.”
Miller told The Voice, “I’m a firm believer that there is progress in no’s. Embrace your uniqueness because you are unique by being a woman.”
She credits her mother LaTanya Miller for instilling the types of values and perseverance needed to rise in the male-dominated sports industry. Miller started her athletics journey as a young girl playing softball before gravitating to basketball at a friend’s suggestion. “I was so bad, I couldn’t get off the bench,” she recalled, according to NBA.com, noting that she was also “too competitive to be sitting on the bench.”
“Every day I just started practicing. When I’m not good at something, it drives me crazy. The next summer I started on the AAU team. Made my mother get a basketball goal. Then I played on the high school team. Basketball came about because I wasn’t good initially,” Miller added.
In these new basketball roles, she wants to pay it forward. “I come from a family of women, raised by a single mom, so that’s important for me to be able to do this, to give her something.”
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