Peter Roby

Dartmouth President Philip J. Hanlon has named Peter Roby ’79 interim athletics director beginning Feb. 16, 2021. Roby will serve in the position through June 2022.

He was co-captain of Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team as a senior and began his coaching career with a season spent as an assistant men’s basketball coach at Dartmouth.

Roby served from 2007-2010 as an at-large representative on the Dartmouth Alumni Council, and has been a secretary of his class and a longtime Dartmouth College Fund volunteer.

“Peter Roby is a highly respected leader in intercollegiate athletics. We look forward to welcoming him back to Dartmouth,” says Hanlon.

Roby led athletics at Division I Northeastern for more than 10 years, through 2017, after spending five years as director of the university’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, which seeks to create social change using the influence and appeal of sports. He is a former member of the NCAA D-I Men’s Basketball Committee, which selects and seeds the annual NCAA tournament field, and has worked as a strategic consultant to the NCAA, including in its leadership development programs.

“I’m honored and humbled to be asked to serve the college and will do all I can to bring our athletics community together,” says Roby.

He was the men’s basketball coach at Harvard for six seasons, after three years as an assistant coach. In addition to his assistant coaching stint at Dartmouth, Roby was an assistant men’s basketball coach at Stanford and at the U.S. Military Academy.

Roby is a member of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, created in 1989 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which works to develop and lead change that prioritizes the education, health, safety, and success of student-athletes. He is also an inaugural member of the Black AD Alliance, formed by Division I athletics directors in July 2020 out of the national outcry for social justice reform in America, and serves on the Allies Subcommittee within the alliance.

In addition to his work in athletics, Roby spent several years in marketing at Reebok, including three years as the athletic outfitter’s vice president of U.S. marketing. A government major at Dartmouth, Roby has a master’s degree in leadership from Northeastern.