Peter Roby

Former Director of Athletics and Recreation, Northeastern University, and Senior Consultant to the NCAA

Peter Roby has been a leader in college sports for more than four decades — as a basketball player, coach, sports marketing executive, scholar and athletics director. Roby is currently a strategic consultant to the NCAA and its Leadership Development programs. For more than a decade he has been a lead facilitator for the NCAA’s Pathway program, which is designed to help elevate senior-level professionals in athletics administration to athletics directors. His expertise has been sought nationwide as a speaker and advisor. Clients include Boston College, Drexel University, MIT, New Balance Development Corp., the Colonial Athletic Association, the Northwest Conference, and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

For more than a decade, Roby served as director of athletics and recreation at Northeastern University, where he directed the university’s 18-sport, NCAA Division I athletic department, which competes in the Colonial Athletic Association, Hockey East Association, and Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges. In that role, Roby also oversaw Northeastern Campus Recreation, which offers more than 40 club and 30 intramural sports teams, as well as a wealth of physical education opportunities for Northeastern students.

Under Roby’s leadership, Northeastern reached new levels of success, winning seven regular season conference championships, 17 postseason conference championships, two Women’s Beanpots, and eight New England Championships in track and field. Under his guidance, Northeastern college athletes maintained a cumulative grade point average of 3.0 or better in 20 consecutive semesters.

Roby’s impact was felt far beyond the Northeastern campus. He is a former member of the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, which is responsible for selecting and seeding the NCAA tournament field. Prior to being appointed athletics director in 2007, Roby served as the director of the Northeastern Center for the Study of Sport in Society, where he was a national leader championing the role sports can play in bringing about positive social change through research, education, and advocacy.

Before that, Roby was the vice president of U.S. marketing at Reebok, and served six seasons as men’s basketball head coach at Harvard University and three years as an assistant coach. Before joining Harvard, Roby was an assistant coach at Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Roby is a 1979 graduate of Dartmouth College, where he was co-captain of the basketball team and earned a bachelor’s degree in government. In 2008, he received his master’s degree in leadership from Northeastern.

Roby, a father of three, was recently inducted into the Northeastern University Athletics Hall of Fame.