Mary Roby was inducted into the national athletic director’s Hall of Fame in 1995, part of the same class with Ohio State AD Jim Jones, Nebraska AD Bob Devaney and BYU’s Glen Tuckett. It was a class of heavyweights, and Roby was an immediate fit.
Growing up in small-town Miami, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, the daughter of a rural ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ mining family, Roby and her family spoke Croatian until she reached kindergarten. After that, she spoke the language of success.
Roby, No. 51 on our list of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s Top 100 Sports Figures of the last 100 years, was the director of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s Women’s Recreation Association — essentially the athletic director of the UA women’s sports department — when Title IX legislation was passed in 1972.
That was the day the U.S. government ruled that women’s college athletics must be treated as the equal of men’s college sports.
People are also reading…
“We struggled, pushed, begged, crawled, and little by little, we grew," Roby told me in a 1999 interview. “I’ve seen everything. I came through it all."
Under the umbrella of the UA’s athletic department — although the women’s administrators were not welcomed to offices in McKale Center until 1982 — Roby began the 1972-73 school year with an annual budget of $35,000.
Talk about your “little by little."
A year later the UA women’s athletic budget grew to $60,000. Then $101,000. Then $140,000. Then $150,000. Then $169,000.
Finally, in the 1979-80 school year, after ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ had become a member of the Pac-10, the women’s athletic budget rose to $750,000 annually. It did not hit $1 million for two more years, as the women’s athletic department was fully merged with the UA’s men’s athletic department.
Roby was so determined to build an elite women’s sports program that when the UA had an opening for a women’s basketball coach in the early '80s, she phoned soon-to-be-legendary Tennessee coach Pat Head Summitt and tried to recruit her to ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥.
That’s the type of vision Roby lived by. When she retired in 1989, she had led the coaching searches for softball’s Mike Candrea and swimming’s Frank Busch, and she had directed the UA administration to hire Cedric Dempsey as the school’s athletic director. Talk about a streak of home runs.
Not bad for someone who spent her days as an ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ student on the field hockey team, driven for success, subsequently hired to coach and teach for the Texas Longhorns, USC Trojans, Colorado Buffaloes and Cal Bears, all of which led to her induction into the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics Hall of Fame.
Roby returned to her alma mater in 1959.
“In the ‘70s," she told me, “our budget was so small that we could only afford one set of new uniforms a year for our 10 sports. The year Title IX was implemented, I was turned down when I requested to hire a sports information director and to start a fencing team.
“I was even turned down when I asked for warmup gear for our basketball and softball teams. We had four scholarships for basketball. That all changed."
Now the NCAA allows 15 scholarships for women’s basketball.
Roby, who died in 2012 at age 85, was a force in that change, not just at ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ but in college athletics.