Associate Director of Athletics Development William Roth will be leaving Penn to become the Director of Athletics at Oberlin College.
At Penn Roth mostly dealt with peripheral athletic affairs and led much of the fundraising efforts and other community events for the athletics department as well as serving as a senior administrator for the Penn Relays. “Mr. Roth, as Chair of the Campaign for Penn Athletics, has been instrumental in helping us raise over $100 million which has helped create facilities like Weiss Pavilion and Penn Park” Athletics Director Steve Bilsky said in an e-mail.
With the move, Roth is looking forward to having a more hands-on role within the Oberlin community.
“Whereas my role here has been a lot of work with the external constituencies and helping to execute many of the visions that our overseers put forward, at Oberlin I'm looking forward to being one of the key partners to develop the sense of values, the sense of goals and being responsible to make sure we follow through on them,” Roth said.
As a graduate of Swarthmore College and three-sport student athlete, the move to a small liberal arts college like Oberlin will not be foreign to him.
“I've always wanted to be an athletic director and I was a product of a Division III environment,” Roth said. “[Swarthmore] was a Division III institution very similar to Oberlin in size, academic reputation and scope of programming…I just saw a lot of similarities in terms of my own experience.”
Roth has been Associate Director at Penn since 2007, and he sees a strong connection between the Ivy League athletic experience and that offered at Oberlin.
“The values that that Division III environment offers are very similar to the value system that we have here in the Ivy League,” Roth said. “It's really truly playing for the passion related to competitiveness and the game. There's a real commitment that athletics is about teaching life skills, not just providing entertainment.”
Bilsky said that Penn is presently conducting a search for his replacement and has not decided on anyone yet.
