Mary Roby was inducted into the national athletic directorâs Hall of Fame in 1995, part of the same class with Ohio State AD Jim Jones, Nebraska AD Bob Devaney and BYUâs Glen Tuckett. It was a class of heavyweights, and Roby was an immediate fit.
Growing up in small-town Miami, Arizona, the daughter of a rural Arizona 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 Tucsonâs Top 100 Sports Figures of the last 100 years, was the director of Arizonaâs Womenâs Recreation Association â essentially the athletic director of the UA womenâs sports department â when Title IX legislation was passed in 1972.
That was the day the U.S. government ruled that womenâs college athletics must be treated as the equal of menâs college sports.
âWe struggled, pushed, begged, crawled, and little by little, we grew," Roby told me in a 1999 interview. âIâve seen everything. I came through it all."
Under the umbrella of the UAâs athletic department â although the womenâs administrators were not welcomed to offices in McKale Center until 1982 â Roby began the 1972-73 school year with an annual budget of $35,000.
Talk about your âlittle by little."
A year later the UA womenâs 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 Arizona had become a member of the Pac-10, the womenâs athletic budget rose to $750,000 annually. It did not hit $1 million for two more years, as the womenâs athletic department was fully merged with the UAâs menâs athletic department.
Roby was so determined to build an elite womenâs sports program that when the UA had an opening for a womenâs basketball coach in the early '80s, she phoned soon-to-be-legendary Tennessee coach Pat Head Summitt and tried to recruit her to Arizona.
Thatâs the type of vision Roby lived by. When she retired in 1989, she had led the coaching searches for softballâs Mike Candrea and swimmingâs Frank Busch, and she had directed the UA administration to hire Cedric Dempsey as the schoolâs athletic director. Talk about a streak of home runs.
Mary Roby was a force for decades in collegiate sports, at UA and also on a national scale.
Not bad for someone who spent her days as an Arizona 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.
âIn the â70s," she told me, âour 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.
âI 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 womenâs basketball.
Roby, who died in 2012 at age 85, was a force in that change, not just at Arizona but in college athletics.
