Governor Maura Healey, right, joined Allison Feaster for their “Boston on Boston” panel at the Globe Summit on Wednesday.
Governor Maura Healey, right, joined Allison Feaster for their “Boston on Boston” panel at the Globe Summit on Wednesday.Ben Pennington/for The Boston Globe
In their lines of work, Allison Feaster and Maura Healey can walk through a door, look up, and find that they’re one of just a few women in the room. Be it in a NBA boardroom or a State House one, sometimes they may be the only one.
The experience has taught the Boston Celtics executive and Massachusetts governor important lessons, they said Wednesday in a Globe Summit conversation.
“There is room [at the table for women] and there is power in paying it forward,” Feaster said.
“And,” Healey later added, “you’ve got to take up the space.”
Feaster and Healey, both former point guards on the Harvard University basketball team, reflected Wednesday at the House of Blues Boston on their shared experiences on the court, in trailblazing in their fields, and the rising popularity of women’s sports.
“Everyone watches women’s sports,” Healey said.
“And if you don’t, then your head is in arse,” Feaster added.
Feaster, now the Celtics’ vice president of team operations and organizational growth, was a three-time Ivy League Player of the Year, a 10-year WNBA veteran, and the top player on the 1998 Harvard team that made history as the first No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1seed in the NCAA tournament in Division I men’s or women’s basketball history.
Healey has a decent sports résumé herself. A New England Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, she was a co-captain at Harvard during her four-year career. She graduated in 1992 and played two years of professional ball in Austria.
She has since wrapped basketball into her political identity. In 2022, her gubernatorial campaign distributed buttons with the phrase, “My Governor is a Baller.” She held her inauguration at TD Garden, where guests could shoot on mini basketball hoops and take home oversized foam fingers. The theme that night: “Moving The Ball Forward.”
Sports remain a part of both of their identities because it has shaped, and continues to shape, their world view. Healey pointed to growing up in New Hampshire where she was the only girl on her Little League baseball team, yet played shortstop and pitched.
“Thank God I had those experiences,” said Healey, the first woman elected governor in Massachusetts history, “because it gave me a certain confidence that I think served me well, because it can, it’s otherwise pretty hard.”
Feaster said basketball helped her travel the world, and meet role models in her life. Now, with the Celtics — where she was one of a small list of women in NBA front offices when she was first hired — she takes the view that her role is a privilege and to “use what we have to uplift others, to pour into others.”
She later turned back to a basketball analogy, after Healey, a guard by trade, jokingly asked Feaster, a high-scoring forward in her playing days, if point guard was her favorite position.
“The beautiful thing about point guards, everybody wants to score the ball. You — point guards — take pride and pleasure in the assists," Feaster said. “And that’s what’s going to take us forward.”
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.