To hear Kim Stone recount it, she learned one of her earliest life lessons on a sweltering late summer day in 1990 on the Greentree Practice Field. She was fresh out of college and had started a new job in what is now athletics communications at the University of Miami.
Stone was, by far, the most junior staff member, and her role was, as she put it, to be invisible. “This was at the time of the UM football dynasty. I was assigned to the freshmen for media day, and [specifically] the freshman defensive line,” she recalled. “Someone asked one of the linemen, ‘do you hope to make it to the NFL one day?’ The lineman said ‘no,’ and everyone thought he was underselling himself. The lineman went on to say, ‘I’m going to be a professional wrestler.’”
The freshman lineman was Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock. The encounter made a lasting impression on Stone. “He understood who he was before others knew what he could be and become, and that was one of the first things I learned, that your identity is who you are before you need permission to dream that big. Don’t wait for others to tell you what you are and what you can be,” she said.
That lesson, which Stone calls “identify before permission,” marked the launch of a career that has carried her to the pinnacle of professional sports and arena management.
Now CEO of the Washington Spirit of the National Women’s Soccer League, Stone, who earned a master’s in business administration at Miami Herbert Business School in 2003, returned to the Coral Gables Campus on March 3 to deliver the Distinguished Alumni Lecture before an appreciative audience of alumni, students, staff, and friends of the U.
Established in 1995, the Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series was the brainchild of Stu Bloch, B.A. ’64, and Julia Chang Bloch, former U.S. ambassador to Nepal. Their generosity helped launch the lecture series, and its future was secured in 2023 with the announcement of a planned $1 million bequest from the Blochs.
During her remarks, Stone shared two other closely related life lessons, “standards before spotlight” and “discipline before celebration,” that were ingrained during her 23-year tenure with the Miami Heat that spanned the team’s three NBA championships.
Stone described how the period after an organization scores a big win is when it is most vulnerable to a drop-off in results. “I had always thought that winning the trophy is what makes the difference. It’s not—it’s the Mondays,” she explained. “It’s the day after you’ve won a game, and you come back, you’re in the weight room, you’re on the practice field, you’re in your video sessions, you know what you did wrong, and you’re always looking to get better. You have to have the discipline to do these things as an organization.”
“The standards don’t change, and you don’t lower [them] even though you’re winning. And one day, your talent will leave or age out. You must have your standards in place, because your standards will outlast your talent,” Stone added.
By 2019, Stone was eager for a fresh challenge, and she found it on the opposite side of the country. The Golden State Warriors, who had won three NBA championships between 2015 and 2018, were building a new, state-of-the-art sports and entertainment arena in San Francisco and needed someone to run it. They tapped Stone, and Chase Arena opened in September 2019. As general manager, Stone guided the venue to earn Sports Business Journal’s 2019 Venue of the Year and GBAC Star facility accreditation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, with the Washington Spirit, whose star forward Trinity Rodman routinely appears on lists of the world’s best female soccer players, Stone is fully invested in making an impact in women’s professional sports. Under her leadership and that of team owner Michelle Kang, the team has seen record growth in season ticket sales, fan base expansion, and commercial operations.
Throughout a career marked by big pivots and daunting challenges, Stone has never forgotten that day 36 years ago at Greentree, and the foundations laid at the U. And when, in 2024, Manny Kadre, chair of the University’s Board of Trustees, invited Stone to join the board, she was “so honored.”
“I don’t take anything for granted,” Stone concluded. “I go back to Greentree, where I was just sort of an invisible person, [and think] ‘look at what you’ve learned in the moment you think you’re not going to.’ And all of this has formed who I am. And I am a Cane through and through.”
