By Jill Saftel, News Staff

Now that the ice has melted Matthews Arena and the basketballs have been stored away for the 2012-13 season, all of Northeastern has been given the chance to look back at the seasons of our winter sport teams with clear heads, including Athletic Director Peter Roby. In his semesterly sit down with The News, Roby broke down everything from expectations after the men’s basketball team’s record-breaking season to hope for men’s hockey to bounce back from its last place Hockey East finish.

Men’s Basketball
In what might have been the most memorable season of Northeastern’s winter sports, the men’s basketball team went undefeated for eight games and captured the Colonial Athletic Association’s regular season title. The team’s run in the CAA tournament was cut short by James Madison University in the finals, but the Huskies still had a chance to play some more basketball at the National Invitation Tournament. The Alabama Crimson took down Northeastern in the first round, but the Huskies will return with some young core talent to the team next year. Seniors Jonathan Lee and Joel Smith are the Huskies’ only departures, but they take with them both leadership and experience.

“We had some milestones that we reached for the first time which was really exciting, and I think the thing that’s most exciting is what we think the future can be for the program,” Roby said. “We’re certainly going to miss Jon and Joel’s leadership and their talent, no doubt. They’ve put so much into the program and it’s been so much fun to watch them develop as players over four years.

“The next step is to win a CAA championship and get to the NCAA tournament. It doesn’t mean that it’s just automatically going to happen because we got to where we got to last year. There’s so much that has to go your way and you’ve got to play. You have to go on the road and you have to beat people. You have to make shots and you have to defend. You’ve got to do all that stuff. But our goal has been to be one of the top teams in the CAA, and if you can finish in the top two or three in our conference you have the chance to do some damage nationally, and that’s always going to be the goal. Certainly, nothing that happened this year would lead us to believe that we can’t reasonably consider that as a goal.”

Women’s Basketball
After two seasons ending with 8-22 overall records, the women’s basketball team turned it around for its 2012-13 effort, ending the season in fifth place in the CAA with a 17-13 overall record. The team was knocked out in the first round of the CAA tournament, but head coach Daynia La-Force was named CAA Coach of the Year, a testament to the team’s improvement regardless of the outcome in the postseason.

“Really proud of their effort and proud of Daynia’s leadership and what our players accomplished,” Roby said. “We said at the beginning of this season that we thought we’d seen a glimpse of it at the end of last year, that the way they finished last year portended well for this year. They had a nucleus of players coming back that we thought were talented enough to compete in the CAA with enough experience to make it happen and a talented coaching staff that knew what they needed to focus on.

“It went the way we hoped it would. We wanted to start to crack that top echelon of the conference and we flirted with fourth and fifth pretty much most of the year. And even with the way we finished, we had some games that we left out there that I think both the team and the players and the coaching staff feel like we could have won them. So we kick ourselves a little bit about that, but that’s a good thing. If you win 17 games and you still feel like you left some on the table, let’s try that again and see if we’ve learned something from that.”

As for La-Force’s Coach of the Year honors, Roby said he’s recognized how difficult the journey to this point has been for his head coach and her staff.

“For Daynia, it’s been a little bit of on-the-job training. She only had one year of head coaching experience when she arrived and you get thrown into a conference as competitive as the CAA, and it’s tough. We’ve had to make sure that we gave her the support that she needed, and we had to be patient and we had to help her, so some of it was falling on us to be helpful, to put them in that position. I think she did a really nice job of developing her team and getting them to play a style that fit them.”

Men’s Hockey
In head coach Jim Madigan’s second season with the Huskies, the men’s hockey team missed Hockey East playoffs for the second consecutive year. Young talent in Kevin Roy and some strong defensemen weren’t enough to overcome injury and depth issues in a league with the level of competition Hockey East has, and the team finished 5-18-4 in conference play. However, Roby said there’s a shared excitement between himself and Madigan at the thought of getting back to work, and that they both wish the season could start tomorrow.

“It wasn’t the finish, the middle or the beginning that anybody was looking for,” Roby said. “What we have to remind ourselves of is just because we root for people to do well doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. This isn’t a fantasy or a storybook. Everytime you go out there you either have a chance to win or lose or tie in hockey and what you have to do is earn it. You have to make plays and you have to play well enough to beat the person in front of you. We didn’t do that. It’s not from a lack of effort and I don’t think it’s from a lack of preparation. We’ve got to instill a culture of high expectations and accountability and attention to detail so that winning because a residual effect of those things.

“It’s only getting tougher, Notre Dame is coming into the league. The teams that are in our conference are just going to keep loading up, so we’ve got to be ready because if you’re not ready and you don’t have quality talent and they don’t play as a cohesive unit, you’re going to get beat. In this league, if you’re down they’re going to step on your neck. But UMass-Lowell has proven it, they won three games two years ago. Three games, and they’re playing in the Frozen Four. It can be done.”

For more from Roby on the state of Northeastern’s athletic teams, including women’s hockey and spring sports, pick up the April 18 issue of The News.