Changemakers

Katie Grossman O’Reilly ’03: Creating Memorable Experiences for Basketball Fans

Jared Scott Tesler
Katie Grossman O’Reilly ’03 is living the dream, one NBA season at a time.
 
“I have a dream job—I get to do what I love for the city I grew up in,” says O’Reilly, Chief Marketing Officer of the Philadelphia 76ers.
 
O’Reilly, who got her first taste of sports leadership as captain of The Shipley School’s girls’ basketball and lacrosse teams (“The skills I learned through team sports—teamwork, communication, resilience, and sportsmanship—set the foundation for my career and are the skills I tap into every day”), will enter her seventh season with the 76ers this fall. As a member of the senior management team, she leads the Marketing Department in advertising, branding, business and fan development, content production, creative, digital media, game presentation, marketing, merchandising, social media, and VIP events and hospitality. The ultimate goal, she says, is to “make every single touchpoint authentic to our city, for our fans, to our brand.”
 
Despite a demanding work schedule, O’Reilly always finds time to give back. Each year, she commits 76 hours of community service through the Project 76 Employee Volunteer Service Program, which has benefited the Boys & Girls Clubs of Camden County and Philadelphia, the Camden Children’s Garden, the Children’s Home Campus of Legacy Treatment Services, and the School District of Philadelphia’s Samuel Gompers School. A mentor to Wilt Chamberlain Memorial Fund Scholarship recipients, she also sits on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Philadelphia Men’s Basketball League, which hosts the annual Treasure Beach Jamaican Youth Basketball Camp, and the Board of Governors of the Sixers Innovation Lab—housed within the professional basketball team’s 125,000-square-foot Training Complex in Camden, New Jersey—which she helped found and launch in 2017.
 
One year earlier, in recognition of her outstanding success and contributions to the community, O’Reilly was selected from more than 300 nominations and named to the Philadelphia Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 list. “It’s always an honor to be recognized for your work, especially in the city in which you’re so deeply entrenched,” she says. “The City of Philadelphia is going through a renaissance right now. The amount of talent here is absolutely tremendous.”
 
O’Reilly, who returns to Shipley every Thanksgiving Day to play football with her family, says she is equally honored to be recognized as a Shipley Changemaker: “Shipley lays the groundwork for its students to grow, develop, and be successful. It was a very important part of my upbringing.”
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The Shipley School is a private, coeducational day school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade students, located in Bryn Mawr, PA. Through our commitment to educational excellence, we develop within each student a love of learning and a desire for compassionate participation in the world.