Board of Directors

Stephen Seelbach, Board Chair, Managing Director, Vista Equity Partners

Chris Sheldon, Treasurer, Head of Leveraged Credit, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. 

Katherine Schloss Ackerman, Corporate Associate , Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Amy Atkinson, Retired Television News Producer, CBS and ABC

Marc Bensadoun, PhD, Seed-stage Investor and Advisor

Robert Bingham, Founder, Bingham, Osborn & Scarborough, LLC

Tony Brettkelly, Founder, Latitude 38 Housing Services 

James Ford, Principal, Vista Equity Partners

W. Reed Foster, Jr., Executive Search Consultant, Foster Talent Partners

Kwame Johnson, M.D, Senior Product Manager, Hinge Health

James K. Mitchell, Partner, Transaction Advisory Services, Ernst & Young

Matt Price, President, Activate

Blair Richardson, Managing Director, Houlihan Lokey

Missy Wyant Smit, Real Estate Agent, Compass

Lauren Patrizio Xaba, Founder of SquashDrive

Stephen Seelbach, Chair

Stephen is a Managing Director at Vista Equity Partners and previously worked at Morgan Stanley for 15 years in Hong Kong, Singapore and New York. Stephen lived 13 years in Asia before moving to San Francisco in 2014. Stephen started playing junior squash in New Jersey and won his largest trophy (which he still has) as the NJ 10 & under state champion. He attended Amherst College and co-captained the team that was ranked as high as 2nd in the US. Stephen has 4 young children who are eagerly awaiting their first squash rackets. He graduated magna cum laude with Political Science and French degrees as well as an International Relations Certificate. 

Chris Sheldon, Treasurer

Chris is Co-Head of Leveraged Credit at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. He joined KKR in 2004 and sits on Asset Management’s Leveraged Credit and Private Credit Investment Committees, along with their Portfolio Management Committee. Prior to joining KKR, Chris was a Senior Investment Analyst with Wells Fargo’s High Yield Securities Group. He has also worked at Young & Rubicam and within the media-planning department of SFM Media Corporation.

Chris started playing squash at a young age in New Jersey. After serving as captain of the Princeton Day School team, he went on to help found, develop, and captain the Denison University squash program. He holds a B.A. from Denison University.

Amy Atkinson 

Amy is a broadcast journalist, most recently as the Producer in Afghanistan for the film Girl Rising, the centerpiece of a global campaign for girls education and empowerment. Prior to her work on Girl Rising, Amy was a Producer for CBS News/60 Minutes where her Emmy-award winning work for Ed Bradley over an eleven year period included a broad range of both domestic and international stories. Before 60 Minutes, Amy worked at ABC News/Nightline in Washington, DC first as a researcher for Nightline anchor Ted Koppel, and subsequently as an Associate Producer/Booker for the program. She started her career as an intern reporter at KFTY-50 in Santa Rosa, CA and then as the founding producer of a local broadcast news magazine for the PBS affiliate, KRCB-22 in Rohnert Park, CA.

Amy is a trustee of the British charity Afghan Connection which builds schools and educational programming in Afghanistan; it has funded 46-schools across 10-provinces serving more than 75,000 children since it was founded in 2001. She is a former trustee of Groton School in Groton, MA, San Francisco’s Hamlin School, and the Gateway Public Schools.

She is graduate of Yale University (BA, English, 1984) where she played varsity squash, and Stanford University’s broadcast journalism program. Amy, her husband Mark, their two children—one of whom who loves to play squash too—live in San Francisco.

Bob Bingham

After teaching high school and working in international marketing, Bob entered the investment business in 1981. Bob and Ed Osborn founded Bingham & Osborn in 1985, and subsequently merged with John Scarborough’s investment advisory business in 1989 to form Bingham, Osborn & Scarborough, LLC. Bob retired from the firm in June of 2008.

Jamie Ford

Jamie is a Principal at Vista Equity Partners. Vista is a leading private equity firm focused on investing in software and technology-enabled businesses. Jamie has worked at Vista since its founding in 2000. Prior to joining Vista, Jamie worked in the Mergers and Acquisitions Group at Goldman, Sachs & Co.

Jamie started playing squash at a young age at the Merion Cricket Club in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He went on to play for and captain teams at the Haverford School and Amherst College. Jamie graduated from Amherst magna cum laude with a B.A. in Economics in 1998.

W. Reed Foster, Jr.

Reed is an executive search and technical recruiting consultant who runs a boutique consulting practice at Foster Talent Partners. Early in his career, Reed was a management consultant and then a business development executive in Silicon Valley. Reed joined a very small company in 2001 called Newfield Wireless, Inc. in Berkeley, CA. Over time, Reed came to lead the recruiting and HR team at Newfield Wireless, helping to build the company to over 125 full-time employees, and supported an eventual acquisition by Danaher/Tektronix Communications in 2014. Since 2014 Reed has been working primarily with venture and provate-equity-backed technology companies to help them fill key executive and technical positions.

Reed began his squash career as a young teen at the side of his father, the real W. Reed Foster, at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, but ended up dedicating his athletic pursuits in high school (Loomis Chaffee) to springboard diving where he was a Connecticut State champion and finalist in the New England regional championship meets. Reed continued his diving career in college and was a California state finalist while at Diablo Valley College two years in a row, and then completed his diving career at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he earned a degree in Telecommunications and English. After college he moved back to San Francisco and re-joined the squash community and has been playing hardball, doubles and some softball as much as possible ever since. Reed grew up in Oakland, CA and lives in Piedmont with his wife and three children.

Matt Price

Matt Price is President at Activate. Prior to joining Activate, Matt was a Vice President at Enlighted Inc., the leading wireless sensor network and lighting controls manufacturer for commercial and industrial buildings. Matt was responsible for managing channels and strategic partnerships domestically and internationally as well as the company’s launch into construction markets. Prior to joining Enlighted in 2011, Matt was a Principal at the venture capital firm, Nth Power, where he led investments in a broad range of energy and cleantech investment areas including materials and nanotechnology, fuel cells, biofuels, advanced lighting, and smart grid technologies. Matt was active on the boards of Propel Biofuels, Precursor Energetics, and Topanga Technologies. Matt spent seven years in the fuel cell industry in engineering, product development and business development for two start-up companies Franklin Fuel Cells and Bloom Energy.

Matt is a Kauffman Fellow, received his MBA from the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley where he co-founded the Berkeley Energy Resource Collaborative (BERC). He also holds a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University.

Blair Richardson

Blair Richardson is a Managing Director at Houlihan Lokey, a middle market focused investment bank, where he advises alternative asset managers on a variety of transaction and valuation related matters.  His prior background includes direct private investing and mergers & acquisitions advisory.  Blair holds a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and Accounting from Franklin & Marshall College.  His previous charitable involvement includes Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the Humane League of Lancaster County.  Blair enjoys spending his free time outdoors with his wife, two young daughters, and yellow Labrador Retriever.  

Missy Wyant Smit

Missy has been a San Francisco real estate agent for almost 20 years and consistently ranks within the top 5 agents in the city. Prior to being a founding agent of Compass San Francisco in 2016, Missy was the #1 producer at Hill & Company.

During her time at Princeton University, Missy captained a National championship squash team and achieved first team All-American honors four times. Enthusiastic, competitive, and goal oriented – she remains an active squash and now also pickleball player, and plays in tournaments across the U.S.

Originally from Cincinnati, Missy comes from a family of squash players and is thrilled to be a part of an organization that is making a difference and growing the game of squash.

Young Professionals Board

Sarah Beresford, President, Director, Bayshore Global Management

Cody Cortes, English Teacher, Achieve Academy

Creighton Foulkes, Operations, Medallion

Garrett Kitahata, Student, UC-Berkeley

Matthias Matsui, Investment Banking Analyst, Needham & Company

Ben Warfield, Senior Data Engineer for Lemonade Insurance

Sarah Beresford, President

Sarah is a Director at Bayshore Global Management overseeing strategy and special projects and previously was a strategy consultant at Deloitte in New York City and Brussels, Belgium. Sarah is from the east coast originally and picked up squash in high school at Phillips Exeter. She went on to play for Brown University and served as co-captain in 2013. Sarah moved to the Bay Area after graduating from Harvard Business School in 2020 and now lives in San Francisco.  

Cody Cortes

Cody is a head 4th grade ELA teacher at Achieve Academy, a public charter school in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, CA. Cody is originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts and played squash at Milton Academy and Princeton University. Cody moved to the Bay Area from Philadelphia in 2021 and now lives in Oakland.

Creighton Foulkes

Originally from the east coast, Creighton grew up outside the Boston area in Belmont, MA. He began playing squash in high school and continued playing at Bates College in Lewiston, ME. After graduating from Bates in 2017, Creighton moved out to San Francisco to work at a startup called Py. In 2020, Creighton joined another tech startup called Medallion as an early employee and continues to work at Medallion in operations.

Garrett Kitahata

Garrett is a 4th year student at UC-Berkeley and a Conservation and Resource Studies major. He has an interest in energy consulting/energy sales and has been involved in a few associated solar projects. As a transitioning co-captain of the men’s squash team, acting coach at the first club nationals in 2022, and part-time former Squash Pro at Bay Club, he has served on special projects inside and outside of the squash world. Garrett is from the San Francisco Bay Area and briefly played at Crystal Springs Uplands School with original home club at Bay Club Redwood Shores.

Matthias Matsui

Matthias is an investment banking analyst at Needham & Company assisting companies in the Technology, Media and Telecom sector. Originally from Hong Kong, Matthias grew up playing squash and went on to play in high school at Lawrenceville. Matthias moved to the Bay Area in 2021 after graduating from Brown University, where he studied History and Economics.

Ben Warfield

Ben grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and started playing squash in college at the University of Virginia where he served as treasurer of the club organization. He moved to the Bay Area in 2009 for graduate school at Stanford and now lives in San Francisco where he works as a Senior Data Engineer for Lemonade Insurance (formerly Metromile).