Hours after Texas Southern University’s Board of Regents confirmed Jackson State’s Ashley Robinson as its next athletics director, Jackson State announced that Alyse Wells-Kilbert, the department’s associate vice president and senior woman administrator, has been selected by JSU President Denise Jones Gregory to serve as interim director of athletics. The move is pending approval from the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, which meets Thursday, Aug. 20, where the appointment is likely to appear on the agenda.

Who Is Alyse Wells-Kilbert

Wells-Kilbert is not an outside hire buying time for Jackson State. She has been inside the department since July 2018, when she joined as associate athletics director for fiscal management, and was promoted a year later to associate vice president for athletics and senior woman administrator, the role she held under Robinson. In that role, she has overseen the day-to-day business side of JSU athletics, including fiscal management, ticketing, stadium operations, sports oversight, and sports medicine, while also chairing the SWAC’s Senior Woman Administrators group. She was appointed to the NCAA Women’s Basketball Rules Committee in March 2023 for a four-year term beginning that September, and was honored with the SuperPower Award at the Game ChangHer Awards during the SWAC basketball tournament this past March.

Her path to the role runs through nearly 30 years in college athletics administration and coaching. A valedictorian at Edinburgh High School in Edinburgh, Mississippi, she was a two-sport athlete at Meridian Community College, an Academic All-American in basketball and softball who won the college’s Circle of Excellence Award, Most Outstanding Business Student honor and the Larry Scott Memorial Award as MCC’s top student-athlete, before graduating with a business and office technology degree in 1989. She went on to Belhaven College, where she was the first woman to win the Charles Rugg Scholar-Athlete Award as the school’s top student-athlete while playing basketball and softball, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business in 1991.

After four years as an accountant with the Municipal Energy Agency of Mississippi, Wells-Kilbert moved into college athletics, first as a two-sport head coach at her alma mater, Belhaven, where she also worked as an assistant and associate athletics director, admissions counselor and residence director. In 2001, she was hired as head volleyball coach and director of the student-athlete academic center at Mississippi Valley State, adding the senior woman administrator title and an assistant athletics director for academics role two years later. She left MVSU in 2012 for the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where she served as associate athletics director and senior woman administrator, overseeing the athletics business and ticket offices, NCAA compliance reporting, Title IX coordination and fundraising, before joining Jackson State in 2018.

She has served on the SWAC’s APR Task Force for more than eight years, won the SWAC Alumni Association’s Charles “Chuck” Prophet Wagon Master Award in 2015, was named a Top Distinguished Business Woman in Mississippi by the Mississippi Business Journal in 2023, and was a top-10 finalist out of 50 contenders for the Journal’s Mississippi Business Woman of the Year award in February 2024. She is married to Nate Kilbert, the head women’s basketball coach at fellow SWAC member Alcorn State, and the two have a daughter, Tierra.

The Robinson Connection

Data Driven HBCU has spent the past several weeks tracking Texas Southern’s athletics leadership overhaul, which ended Wednesday when TSU’s Board of Regents confirmed Robinson as vice president and athletics director on a 5-2 vote. Robinson spent eight years building Jackson State into one of the SWAC’s most decorated athletic departments, a run that included hiring Deion Sanders as football coach in 2020 and the 2024 Celebration Bowl. His departure for Houston leaves Jackson State needing its own leadership answer on a similarly tight timeline, with fall sports already underway.

Jackson State made the transition official in a release Wednesday that read more like a send-off than an announcement of a vacancy. President Denise Jones Gregory credited Robinson with helping Jackson State Athletics “achieve competitive and academic success” and gain national visibility, pointing to “multiple conference championships” and the 2025-26 Dr. James Frank Commissioner’s Cup. Robinson, in turn, called Jackson State a place that “will always hold a special place in my heart,” saying the university “gave me the opportunity to come home, serve the people of this great institution, and return to my roots where it all started.” He put a number on his tenure’s results: “Together, we grew the program, won 32 conference championships and two national championships, and made Jackson State Athletics ‘Thee Standard.'” The same release confirmed Wells-Kilbert as the university’s choice for interim athletics director, pending the IHL board’s sign-off.

What’s Next

Jackson State’s post announcing the move framed Wells-Kilbert’s appointment as pending IHL approval. The Mississippi IHL Board of Trustees, which governs the state’s public universities including Jackson State, meets Thursday, Aug. 20, and the appointment is expected to be among the items the board takes up. Meanwhile, the upcoming Jackson State hire of its next Vice President of Athletics/Athletics Director is a story worth watching, one week after Texas Southern closed its own.