Jake Dickert is set for his Wake Forest debut. It’s the latest stop in his winding coaching journey

By Canadian Press on August 27, 2025.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — Jake Dickert has seen college football from just about every angle.

He was a Division III quarterback-turned-receiver planning a path as a math teacher. An assistant coach painting lines on fields and cutting VHS game tapes in a climb through Division II and the Championship Subdivision. A head coach who later saw his program’s power-conference home abruptly fall apart around him.

Those moments are with him now, as he prepares for his Friday debut as Wake Forest’s head coach against Kennesaw State. They color how he energetically approaches everything in rebooting the Demon Deacons.

“Just excited about taking that field, feeling the energy of that stadium,” Dickert said this week. “It’s going to be a proud moment for me, my family, the players that stayed here, the players that joined us.

“I really mean that. It’s a big moment.”

The challenge

Dickert, who turned 42 on Saturday, arrives from Washington State to take on a unique challenge.

This elite private university in central North Carolina has the smallest undergraduate enrollment (roughly 5,500) of any power-conference school. That makes the school an outlier — along with teams like fellow instate school Duke (around 6,500), Vanderbilt (7,200) in the Southeastern Conference and Northwestern (8,000) in the Big Ten — compared to the state schools with massive stadiums and huge followings.

Yet Wake Forest has won before, playing for the Atlantic Coast Conference title and ranking in the top 10 nationally as recently as 2021. That came under Dave Clawson through a patient approach that developed older players to compete against opponents featuring rosters teeming with heralded recruits.

But the landscape has changed since, with players able to cash in on their athletic fame and freely move through the transfer portal. And by the end a second straight 4-8 season, an emotionally exhausted Clawson was fighting back tears as he unexpectedly stepped down in December.

The school moved quickly to hire Dickert, who had spent three-plus seasons leading the Cougars — the last coming after Pac-12 peers scattered to the ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten while leaving Oregon State and Washington State behind.

He’s here to give Wake Forest another jolt.

“Oh man, that first team meeting: the guys were sitting up, at attention, they weren’t moving,” Dickert said with a chuckle. “It was just kind of one of those moments where it’s like, ‘Guys let’s relax, let’s have fun, let’s embrace this.’

“I just think it starts with letting them know that I believe in them … I want our guys to be able to be in an environment where they feel they can be themselves. We’re not generating robots here.”

Injecting energy

What Dickert and his staff are doing, though, is pushing the importance of having energy and competitive zip in everything they do.

Veteran defensive back Nick Andersen has seen it in areas as small as players shooting on a small basketball hoop in a meeting room or playing cornhole.

“Competition is everywhere, energy is everywhere,” Andersen said. “It brings out the best in everyone.”

Receiver Micah Mays Jr. has felt it, too, in early morning meetings and practices.

“We’re all go in there and start yelling, or saying, “Wake up!” and start chanting, just to wake our bodies up,” Mays said.

“Like, I’m walking down the hallway to the meeting, and (Dickert) is talking about ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, get a little pace into you, a little jog, you look a little sleepy.’ He’s always picking it up.”

A winding path

Ask Dickert about that approach, and it’s clear he’s working the only way he knows how — with the same drive from his playing days at Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

This wasn’t his projected route. He graduated with a degree in secondary math education and completed his Master’s degree in general education. And fittingly, the son and grandson of longtime educators was set to become a teacher.

That is, until his father suggested giving college coaching a shot after regretting not doing so himself.

He worked as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, then did so at North Dakota State under his eventual mentor, Craig Bohl. That was the start of a coaching journey through football outposts: South Dakota, Southeast Missouri State, Augustana and Minnesota State, among them.

He eventually reunited with Bohl at Wyoming in 2017, this time as Bohl’s safeties coach and later defensive coordinator.

“When he came back what was really apparent was we had a seasoned veteran coach who was wickedly smart and had the ability to communicate with players,” said Bohl, now the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association.

“He saw the game from maybe a more mature lens, where he had a complete understanding of how offenses could exploit defenses and what answers could come into play.”

Dickert eventually left Wyoming to join Nick Rolovich’s staff at Washington State as defensive coordinator and linebackers coach in 2020, then took over as the interim coach in 2021 w hen the school fired Rolovich for refusing to meet the state’s mandate for employees to have received a COVID-19 vaccine or an exemption.

By the end of that season, Dickert was named the permanent coach after going 3-2 as the interim with a rout of Apple Cup rival Washington. He went 20-17 in Pullman from 2022 until his departure for Wake Forest before the Cougars’ Holiday Bowl loss to Syracuse.

“Jake is part of the new generation of coaches who are not clamoring and complaining about what’s wrong with our game,” Bohl said. “He’s able to bring out what’s really good about our game. And some of that comes from just his perspective.”

What’s next

That perspective includes being thankful for a man who once looked at coaching full-scholarship football merely as a hope. He can rattle off making 11 moves in 17 years chasing that dream, acknowledging it’s a big ask of wife Candice and their three children.

Yet he’s settled in at Wake Forest, rattling off the positives of being in an eastern-seaboard footprint with steady access to talent — either from high school or through the transfer portal — in all directions.

There’s proof football can thrive here if done right. That includes the trophy honoring Wake Forest’s 2006 ACC championship — the only one for an instate school in more than four decades — on a shelf in his office.

His own history and drive to outwork any problem tells him the same.

“We’re ready,” Dickert said. “It’s time to be tested.”

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AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football

Aaron Beard, The Associated Press