A Familiar Face Returns to Lead Aggie Athletics

North Carolina A&T has its next athletics director, and she already knows her way around East Greensboro. The university announced Friday that Katreshia Louis-Verrett, currently the deputy athletics director at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will become A&T’s director of intercollegiate athletics on Sept. 1.

Louis-Verrett succeeds Earl Hilton, who is stepping down after 15 years in the role. She emerged from a national search as the top choice, and her selection brings her career full circle: she served as A&T’s associate athletics director from 2011 to 2017, overseeing compliance, departmental human resources and a staff of 33 that included seven head coaches.

She will oversee 17 intercollegiate teams, more than 300 student-athletes and nearly 50 coaches and staff members.

Two Decades of Division I Experience

Louis-Verrett arrives with roughly 20 years of experience in college athletics administration, the last 9 at UAB, where she has served as deputy athletics director and senior woman administrator since 2017. During her six years at A&T, she was the department’s senior woman administrator with oversight of eight teams, its deputy Title IX coordinator, and the advisor to the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, in addition to running compliance and departmental human resources. Her career in college athletics began at Georgia Tech, where she worked from 2006 to 2011, the final five years as an assistant director of compliance, and her national service includes the NCAA’s Division I Progress Toward Degree Waiver Committee and long involvement in Women Leaders in College Sports and the National Association for Athletics Compliance.

Her credentials also run through Black college ranks: she earned her law degree from Southern University Law Center, the law school of the SWAC’s Southern University, in 2004. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Miami, where she ran track for four years on teams that captured back-to-back Big East championships in 1998 and 1999, a background the university says gives her a working understanding of the pressures of competing at a high level while balancing academics and campus life.

“At North Carolina A&T, our commitment to student success is our No. 1 priority, and that certainly includes the success of our student athletes,” Chancellor James R. Martin II said in the announcement. “Katreshia is equally passionate about that commitment, as well as ensuring that our athletics teams and student athletes have the resources, guidance and support to succeed in competition. She is fiercely competitive herself and will expect excellence from our coaches, staff, and student-athletes. We are delighted that she is rejoining A&T and expect great things under her leadership.”

The Moment She Steps Into

The job Louis-Verrett takes over looks very little like the one Hilton accepted 15 years ago. Division I institutions began sharing athletics-generated revenue directly with student-athletes for the first time in 2025-26, and the cap on that revenue sharing rises to $21.3 million per school this year. Name, image and likeness deals now run through the College Sports Commission, which reviews agreements and enforces standards to ensure they have legitimate business interests, with major questions about booster collectives, deal valuation and enforcement consistency still unsettled.

That is the landscape A&T hired for. The university describes Louis-Verrett as an expert in NCAA regulations and compliance, with deep experience in NIL strategy, sports administration, and Title IX, and it is betting that this skill set will keep the Aggies both competitive on the field and compliant with a maze of new regulations off it.

“I am humbled, honored and excited to serve North Carolina A&T State during this transformative period for college athletics,” Louis-Verrett said. “I look forward to supporting and expanding the reach of this university’s historic mission of academic excellence and supporting the performance of our student-athletes, coaches and staff, as well as taking advantage of new opportunities for growth and success.”

A Big Year in Aggieland

Her first year already has milestones on the calendar. The football program celebrates its 125th anniversary this fall, and its homecoming game will be played during the centennial edition of the Greatest Homecoming on Earth. On the track, A&T’s men have won two straight Coastal Athletic Association indoor conference titles and two consecutive outdoor CAA titles.

The Department She Inherits

Financially, Louis-Verrett takes over one of the larger athletics operations in Black college sports. A&T’s federal filing for the 2024-25 school year reported about $19.1 million in athletics revenues against $19.0 million in expenses, among the largest budgets in Division I HBCU athletics. The university’s own accounting puts the operation higher still: a board report covering the same year, which counts state support and other funding sources the federal filing does not capture, showed about $23.0 million in revenues against $22.7 million in expenses. Both views, along with the rest of the conference, are available in our 2024-25 athletics financial data.

Within her own conference, though, the picture flips. Even using the fuller university-reported figure, A&T’s spending ranked 15th among the 17 athletics departments that compete in the CAA or CAA Football, ahead of only Maine and fellow HBCU member Hampton, and well below the group average of roughly $31.6 million.

Closing that gap, or at least keeping pace, is the resource challenge behind every other item on the new director’s agenda. The tailwind is that A&T’s athletics budget sits within a university that is expanding on nearly every front. A&T is the nation’s largest historically Black university and expects enrollment to top 16,000 students this fall. Because athletics is funded substantially by student fees, every enrollment record broadens the base supporting the program.

The donor base is pulling in the same direction. This August marks the one-year anniversary of the “All Aggies, All In” campaign, and the first-year results made it a record-breaking fundraising effort for the university and Aggie athletics: 1,699 donors, including 983 first-time athletics donors, combined for 3,234 individual donations. The campaign collected $1.2 million in cash, more than double its original goal of $500,000 per year, and $3.6 million overall in pledges, monthly commitments and cash. Campaign leadership, a group that includes Hilton alongside chairs Willie A. Deese and Frank McCain, has already set the next target: $3 million annually by the end of 2028, with at least 4,500 Aggies giving to athletics. Growing that annual giving number and handing it off at an even greater scale now become part of Louis-Verrett’s portfolio.

Hilton leaves his successor a department with conference hardware on the shelf, a donor base giving at record levels, and a growing university behind it. What Louis-Verrett adds is a resume built almost precisely for the era college sports just entered. The full announcement is available on the A&T Athletics website.