Here's what a mid-major college basketball DOBO ACTUALLY does

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It takes a lot of people to keep a D-I basketball team going. There’s the head coach, of course, and his three assistants, who take care of instruction, recruiting, and in-game decisions. The staff may also have a few graduate assistants to help break down video, set up practice equipment, and crunch numbers.

Then you have the tireless work of the athletic trainers to make sure the basketball players are healthy and healing. You have the exhaustive behind-the-scenes promotional and historical work of the Sports Information staff, chronicling everything that happens. There are officials, academic support specialists, nutritionists, and a slew of others whose tireless behind-the-scenes work makes college basketball possible.

But there’s one staffer whose job description might be the most exhaustive, and often, whose work ends up being the most indispensable. The Director of Basketball Operations…or DOBO.

On paper, the DOBO's job is to handle all the administrative and logistical tasks that come with running a program. Booking the hotels and buses? Making sure the athletes are enrolled in the right classes for their majors? Figuring out how to work the projector in the hotel business center the team commandeered for a meeting? That’s all part of the gig.

But like virtually all jobs in college sports, there’s also the “other duties as assigned” part of the job description.

Before COVID, the job responsibilities were already massive, but after COVID, and especially after the start of the NIL and transfer portal era, the job has only become all-encompassing.

To better understand what that actually means, I called up Lauren Tebsherany, the DOBO for Northeastern Men’s Basketball, and one of the few dozen women working on the staff of a D-I men’s basketball program.

Tebsherany is also one of the few DOBOs who have worked in operations for both men’s and women’s programs. I asked her what some of the differences were, from an operations perspective.

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