Athletically Inclined

The journey of Casey Gibson ’13 has taken him from Dominican to Northeastern University to Harvard to Wake Forest University and now to the University of Colorado in Boulder where in September 2018 he began his new job in the athletics department as Assistant Director of Development in the Buff Club.

“This is the next step for my career as I am a full-time calling officer,” says Casey, who is a front-line fundraiser for the CU athletics department focusing on annual fund donations. “I will have a hand in directly impacting student-athletes' lives and experiences at Colorado.”

Casey's ultimate goal is to become an athletics director.

“I never thought in a million years growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona that I would wind up in such places as Winston Salem, North Carolina."

The turning point came at Dominican. Casey arrived from a small K-12 grade school of about 300 students in Arizona where his parents were law enforcement rangers at Grand Canyon National Park. As a Communication and Media Studies major and student-athlete, Casey benefited from internships with Comcast Sports Net Bay Area and the San Jose Earthquakes before beginning an internship in the Dominican athletics department that evolved into a full-time job upon graduation.

What was the best thing about his Dominican experience?

“Where do I start? Everything. It comes from the minute you step on campus,” says Casey, who returned to campus to deliver the keynote address at Convocation 2018. “When I was looking at colleges I wanted the best of both. I wanted athletics. I wanted academics. I needed both.”

Casey received attention and support from coaches, athletics administration, and faculty members, such as communications professor Brad Van Alstyne. They all encouraged him to pursue his master’s degree in sport leadership and Casey went off to Boston.

“Dominican provided me opportunity and flexibility,” Casey says. “I was a Communications major with an emphasis on sports broadcasting, but Brad allowed me to tailor my curriculum toward the administrative side of sports.”

Casey’s sojourn to Boston also reunited him with Jon Delano ‘06, the coach who recruited him to play soccer at Dominican.

Delano, then Harvard’s associate head coach of men’s soccer and now assistant men's soccer coach at the University of Pennsylvania, helped Casey land a part-time job as soccer operations coordinator at Harvard while he attended graduate school at Northeastern. It was also at Harvard that Casey learned about a job opening at Wake Forest, where Casey intended to pursue his dream of being a college athletics director in a Power 5 conference in NCAA Division I. That dream took another step toward reality in 2018 when Casey was endorsed at the University of Colorado by Buff Club director Brandon Leimbach, who was director of athletics at Dominican from 2013-15.

“One of the things I loved about Wake Forest and I loved about Harvard and Dominican is this: At all places the goal is to educate and support the student-athlete,” Casey says.