Northeastern Athletics Director Peter Roby announced Sept. 4 the full-time hiring of seven people to new positions within the administrative and support staff of the athletic department.
George Gardner, Chris Marshall, Tony Ramirez, Sandra Menee, Mike Bishop, Kristi Stake and Dan Boothby were all given full-time positions in the department. Stake, Menee and Ramirez count as new arrivals to the university, while the other four have been at the university the past few years in various capacities.
Roby called the additions a significant step toward advancing his department after the conclusion of last year’s athletics review panel.
“I think it’s exciting because it’s the first opportunity for us to act on the recommendations that I made after the athletics review last year,” he said. “And one of the areas I thought we needed to invest additional resources in was our people, in order to be able to better serve our student athletes and our coaches and our alumni and the general Northeastern community. These hirings are allowing us to do that.”
Roby said the funds for the hires came from the university’s operating budget after he had asked President Joseph Aoun to open up additional resources so the department could address some of its operating issues.
Ramirez and Menee will work as equipment managers, as members of a staff headed by Matt Nareski. Ramirez is expected to work mostly with sports at Parsons Field, according to a press release on GoNU.com, after having spent the past two years in arena football with the Birmingham Steeldogs and Team Arkansas. He has also worked at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, his alma mater. Menee comes to NU from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was employed from 2005-08 as the only equipment manager to travel with teams. She also issued and maintained equipment for the 41 sports offered at MIT according to the release.
The other fresh arrival, Stake, worked with the University of Lousiana Lafayette from 1999-2007, and will take on the position of assistant coordinator of compliance and enrollment. She was the assistant athletic director for compliance at Louisiana Lafayette from 2005-07, the release said.
Bishop becomes the full-time ticket manager after having worked in the Northeastern Box Office since 2003. After serving with NU in various roles since 2005, Boothby takes on an expanded role as a full time member of the athletic training staff, under the title of Assistant Coordinator of Speed, Strength and Conditioning.
Gardner will work under the title of associate AD for external affairs after serving five years at Northeastern’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society. He served as the Director of Marketing and Communications for the center.
Marshall earned a full-time position with NU as coordinator of marketing and promotions after his part-time work with the university in the same capacity for the past year. He has also worked with the Harvard women’s soccer team in the past, as well as the Boston Cannons professional lacrosse team, the press release stated.
Three of the hires are first-timers at Northeastern, and Roby stressed the value in creating new full-time positions and expanding the number of available people with full-time commitments to the athletic department.
Among those full-time positions, he said, were a compliance person, operations person, marketing person, development person, equipment manager, full-time assistant hockey coach and full-time assistant women’s swimming coach,
“We’ve made some significant additions to our organization and people are going to see the impact of that,” he said.
Roby added that these additions were planned into the budget in the spring.
“We had a plan with regards to the positions we had identified back in late spring of last year as we were putting the budget together for this year,” he said.
He also said that these should be the last additions to the staff for the time being, with the addition of one more position in the coming week.
“The last major hire we have to do that we have planned for is the assistant athletic director for development which we hope to finalize in the next week or so,” he said. “At that point we’ll feel like we’re in pretty good shape, that we’ve done what we needed to do to better serve our student athletes and our coaches and our alumni and our community.”
