Park Forest, Illinois native Cary Groth served her alma mater for 23 years as women’s tennis head coach (1982-84), administrator (1984-94), and athletics director (1994-2004). Her meteoric rise began as a two-sport Northern Illinois University letterwinner in tennis (1974-77) and basketball (1976-77) and culminated as AD -- one of only three women athletic directors at an NCAA institution with then I-A (now FBS) football at the time (1994).
From NIU, she went on to the University of Nevada, where she was athletic director for 10 years (2004-14), leaving a legacy of success on and off the field of play. She continues her association with the Reno, Nevada university today as she became director of the sports management program in the College of Business in December 2020.
After leaving her position as athletic director at Nevada, Groth founded The PICTOR Group, an intercollegiate athletics consulting firm, in 2014. Seven years later, The PICTOR Group has helped over 70 clients including athletics programs in NCAA Divisions I, II and III as well as athletics conferences and national sports associations.
As athletic director at Northern Illinois University, her major achievements included (1) engineering the Huskies’ move back to the Mid-American Conference in 1997-98, (2) leading NIU through a pair of NCAA Certification processes (1995, 2000), (3) hiring and sticking with head football coach Joe Novak, (4) initiating the updated Huskie logo (2001), and (5) helping develop such capital facilities projects as the Huskie Stadium East Grandstand (1995) and its FieldTurf surface (2001), the Convocation Center (2002), and improvements to Ralph McKinzie (baseball) and Mary M. Bell (softball) field.
She served on the U.S. Department of Education's Commission on Opportunity in Athletics (2002-03), plus earned the ATALANTA Award (1997), Gen. Robert Neyland Achievement Award (2002), WBCA Administrator of the Year (2003) and NACWAA Division 1-A Administrator of the Year (2003). She served as president of NACWAA (now Women Leaders in College Sports) in 1994-95.
In 1998, Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal included Groth in its "Super 50: Women's Sports Executives”. During her time as an administrator at NIU, she assisted in the merger of the Huskie men's and women's athletic departments.
Although she spent just two seasons as NIU’s women’s tennis coach, she engineered a turnaround, taking a team that was 8-15 the year prior to her arrival, to an 18-15 record in 1984 and was named the MAC women’s tennis Co-Coach of the Year.
At Nevada, Groth’s programs were nationally recognized for their commitment to gender equity and diversity while winning 16 WAC Championships, including multiple men's basketball, women's swimming and diving, softball and football titles. Every Nevada team participated in postseason play during her tenure. The University of Nevada’s graduation success rate (GSR) for student-athletes rose in each of Groth’s nine years at the helm, and Wolf Pack teams turned in eight consecutive years of penalty-free academic performance in the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rates report.
She raised more than $70 million for new facilities and upgrades and was instrumental in working with donors to complete more than $40 million in facility construction and renovations. The University of Nevada became 82 percent self-funded under her leadership.
A four-sport athlete at Rich East High School, Groth taught at Rich South and West Aurora high schools in the Chicago area prior to moving into coaching and administration at NIU. A "double" Huskie, she earned her bachelor’s degree in physical education in 1978 and a master’s in educational leadership in 1999. Groth was inducted in the NIU Athletics Hall of Fame in 2010 and in 2016, was honored with the University’s College of Education Distinguished Alumni Award.
