Tamika Catchings
TED Speaker, WNBA Hall of Famer, Entrepreneur & Leadership Keynote Speaker
Tamika Catchings
TED Speaker, WNBA Hall of Famer, Entrepreneur & Leadership Keynote Speaker
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Biography
Tamika Catchings is a TED Speaker, WNBA Hall of Famer, entrepreneur, and leadership keynote speaker whose career spans championship basketball, global advocacy, and scalable business building. A four-time Olympic gold medalist and WNBA champion, Catchings spent 16 seasons with the Indiana Fever — the longest single-franchise career in WNBA history — before being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame. She overcame a severe hearing impairment from childhood, turning adversity into one of the most decorated careers in women's basketball history.
Off the court, Catchings founded Tea's Me Café, an Indianapolis-based community café now expanding through a first-of-its-kind university licensing model, with locations at IU Indianapolis and additional university partnerships in active development. She is the founder of the Catch the Stars Foundation, which has awarded more than $1 million in scholarships and served thousands of underserved youth through literacy, fitness, and mentoring programs.
In 2025, Catchings delivered a TED Talk at TEDSports Indianapolis — "A New Kind of Sports Complex Built for Girls" — alongside former Pentagon strategic communicator Allison Barber, revealing a bold solution to the alarming rate at which girls quit sports. The talk is published on TED.com and has reached a global audience. She is also the author of Catch a Star: Shining Through Adversity to Become a Champion (Baker Books, 2016), with a new author-narrated audiobook edition releasing in fall 2026.
Catchings speaks to corporations, universities, women's leadership conferences, and youth organizations on leadership, resilience, entrepreneurship, and building systems that scale beyond any one person.
Speaker Videos
TEDx: How I Used My Voice to Impact Millions & Win Gold Medals
Tamika Catchings -- from TEDTalk Indianapolis
Tamika Catchings, WNBA Champion
Tamika Catchings: Hall of Famer, Lady Vol For Life
Tamika Catchings | Hall of Fame Career Retrospective
#24Forever: Tamika Catchings Jersey Retirement Ceremony
Tamika Catchings on Growing Up Deaf
Speech Topics
Shining Through Adversity: Becoming a Champion in Work & Life
Drawing on her journey from childhood hearing loss to four Olympic gold medals and a WNBA championship, Tamika shares the mental framework that turned personal adversity into professional excellence — and how audiences can apply the same principles to lead through their own defining challenges.
Building for Legacy: How to Scale Your Impact Beyond Your Name
Inspired by Tea's Me Café's expansion into a university licensing model, this talk explores what it means to build something that grows without you — the systems, the mindset, and the leadership decisions that allow a brand, a team, or an organization to thrive beyond any one person's presence.
Show Up Anyway: Leadership When You Don't Feel Like It
The most important leadership skill isn't motivation — it's consistency. Tamika unpacks what 16 seasons of professional basketball taught her about performing at the highest level on the hardest days, and how that discipline translates directly to business, organizational culture, and personal leadership.
Your Next Sip: Leading Through Pivots and Transitions
Change is inevitable. How leaders navigate it determines everything. Using her own experience closing a beloved business location, pivoting a brand model, and building toward a new vision, Tamika offers a practical and deeply personal framework for leading teams — and yourself — through meaningful change.
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