Tamika Catchings

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," 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.