Jon Gilbert
With 30 years of experience in college athletics, Jon Gilbert is in his fifth year as director of athletics at East Carolina University after being appointed to the post in December 2018.
Gilbert also serves as AD chairman of the American Athletic Conference Athletics Director’s Committee and was named to the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee in 2023.
Gilbert leads an East Carolina University Athletic Department that sponsors 18 varsity sports and showcases 415 student-athletes. Under his direction, the Pirates have excelled in the classroom, on the field and in the community.
Gilbert has emphasized to Pirate Nation from day one the importance of investing in student-athletes to give each program an opportunity to succeed at the highest level. In his four-plus years leading the Pirates, Gilbert watched the football program under head coach Mike Houston return to prominence with back-to-back seasons of bowl eligibility including a bowl win a year ago. The baseball program has soared to new heights under head coach Cliff Godwin with four straight NCAA Regional appearances, three consecutive AAC regular season titles and hosted the first Super Regional in school history at Clark-LeClair Stadium in 2022. The Pirates women’s basketball team embarked on a remarkable journey in 2023 which led to an AAC Tournament Title and the third NCAA Tournament appearance in school history.
Under Gilbert’s leadership, The Pirate Club achieved the highest single-year fundraising total in the 61-year history of the organization with $36.7 million raised in 2022, surpassing the previous mark by $4 million. The six largest gifts in ECU Athletics and Pirate Club history have been secured over the past four years under Gilbert including the largest one-time philanthropic gift. Grady-White Boats made the then largest donation in ECU Athletics and Pirate Club history in 2020 to support the funding of a state-of-the-art weight training facility. In recognition of this gift, the ECU athletics complex was named the Grady-White Boats Athletic Campus.
In May of 2022, Gilbert and the Pirate Club launched the Pirates Unite Campaign for Comprehensive Excellence, a $60 million venture to provide critical funds and essential training spaces that will transform the experiences of current and future Pirate student-athletes. More than $23 million was invested in the first 13 months of the campaign including the naming rights to a multipurpose indoor facility which will be named the Isley Indoor Performance Center. The $5 million investment from the Isley Family is the largest in ECU Athletics and Pirate Club history. Naming rights were committed to the Boneyard (The Clark Family) and the baseball building expansion project (Dick and Sarah Bennett).
TowneBank Tower at Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium was completed prior to the 2019 football season. The structure was part of a $60 million Southside Renovation Project, which includes a working area for media, five founder’s suites, 19 standard suites, 22 loge boxes and 550 seats in the Trade Club. All seats in the TowneBank Tower have sold out the last two seasons.
Upgrades to Minges Coliseum continue under Gilbert’s guidance with a goal to enhance athletic events along with the numerous University and campus-wide events and outside rentals in Minges. Gilbert oversaw the redesign of Minges Coliseum game floor and graphics in 2020. Chairback seats will replace the bleachers on one side in 2023 which will allow additional premium seats in the lower level with greater comfort and accessibility. New lighting throughout Williams Arena will be completed by September 2023.
The 7,000-square foot Rogers Family Performance Center was completed in November 2022, a new auxiliary weight room behind Clark-LeClair Stadium that is utilized by all 18 sport programs and allows more resources to student-athletes.
As part of an agreement between ESPN and the American Athletic Conference, Gilbert worked to build a new production facility to house the department’s ESPN productions. The department produced more 110 ESPN-plus productions in 2022-23. Among other items completed under Gilbert’s leadership include the renovation of a new weight room and football turf practice field, new football offices, the addition of an auxiliary turf practice field, the construction of an indoor softball batting cage, complete renovation of women’s swimming and diving locker room, a new tennis locker room, replacement of scoreboards at stadiums that house that lacrosse, soccer and softball, and improvements to Williams Clark Club in Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium that included new furniture, televisions and additional features.
The student-athlete experience both on and off the field is at the forefront of Gilbert’s leadership. ECU Athletics will bring in a new full-time mental health professional in 2023 to work with student-athletes. In Gilbert’s tenure, ECU Athletics has made significant strides academically. The Pirates had a record-breaking academic year (2022-23), setting a new school-high mark with a 3.22 annual department GPA with 14 programs recording a GPA of 3.0 or higher. Pirate student-athletes have combined for a 3.0 GPA or higher for 13 consecutive semesters. In the most recent APR scores, ECU Athletics produced a 993 score which is the highest in department history. Five Pirate programs have perfect single-year APR scores. In 2021-22, nine programs recorded their highest annual GPA.
Gilbert’s first major hire at ECU, which immediately followed his formal appointment in early December, was head football coach Mike Houston. Houston took over a program that had produced three straight 3-9 seasons and he has led the Pirates to 15 wins the last two seasons and consecutive bowl games including a Birmingham Bowl win in 2023.
Kim McNeill, who was named the head women’s basketball coach in April of 2019, produced a historical season in 2022-23 with a 23-10 mark and took home AAC Coach of the Year honors. Her squad finished third in the regular season American Athletic Conference standings, won the 2023 AAC Tournament Championship and earned just the third NCAA postseason appearance in program history. Attendance has increased more than 60 percent from 2021-22 and the Pirates registered their highest average attendance in 2023 in 14 seasons.
In the area of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), Gilbert launched added support for student-athletes with the creation of the SABRE program in 2021 in partnership with The Miller School of Entrepreneurship. The goal of SABRE is to provide the necessary tools in numerous areas to support student-athletes to build their personal brand and maximize NLI opportunities.
Season tickets have increased in every sport under Gilbert’s leadership. Football season tickets sales are up 21 percent since 2018, baseball season tickets sold out for the first time in program history in 2022 and 2023, while men’s and women’s basketball saw increases of 25 and 65 percent in attendance in 2022-23, respectively. In 2023, a new Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium single-game attendance record was set with 51,711 for the season-opener against NC State, including a school-record 13,100 students. The largest single game regular season attendance records for football, baseball, soccer, lacrosse and women’s basketball have been established in the last four years.
The football gameday experience was reconstructed in 2019. Gilbert worked closely with campus leadership to allow the sale of alcoholic beverages at athletic facilities beginning in 2019. The Pirate Walk was reimagined with the ECU Marching Band and Spirit Squad leading the football team through the Pirate faithful outside of the TowneBank Tower. The Kids Zone was unveiled in 2019 inside Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium and was added for all basketball and baseball games as well. A major priority for Gilbert continues to be more engagement with past letterwinners. The East Carolina Letterwinners Club was launched in 2022 with the goal to recognize and engage with the student-athletes that invested so much time and effort at ECU.
Gilbert secured a new, exclusive multimedia rights holder for the athletic department. ECU and Playfly Sports agreed to a contract beginning in the summer of 2022 through the 2034 academic year. This agreement has significant financial implications for the department.
Prior to serving as athletics director at the University of Southern Mississippi since January 2017, Gilbert worked in senior athletics administrative positions at two Southeastern Conference institutions – the University of Alabama (16 years) and the University of Tennessee (6 years).
Gilbert is a graduate of Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, N.C., where he was a three-year letterman on the football team. He earned a master’s degree in sport administration at Eastern Kentucky University, while working as a graduate assistant football coach. The Colonels captured one Ohio Valley Conference championship and earned two berths in the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs.
He and his wife, Katie, have two children – daughter Larsen and son Kent.
