Washington State reveals supporting staff for 2022
PULLMAN – Washington State’s football program announced its “team behind the team” Friday, revealing over Twitter its finalized list of strength and conditioning coaches, recruiting/operations staffers and analysts, quality control assistants and graduate assistants.
Strength and conditioning
Dwain Bradshaw reprises his role as the Cougars’ head strength and conditioning coach, a position he has held since early 2020. Bradshaw came to Pullman alongside former coach Nick Rolovich after a year in the same job at Hawaii. His background includes stops at Texas Tech, USC and Arizona State, his alma mater.
New Cougars coach Jake Dickert retained strength and conditioning assistants Tim Hicks and Richard Guarascio. Prior to joining WSU last year, Hicks was the performance director at “EXOS,” a renowned training company that has worked with over 100 pro athletes. Guarascio enters his fifth season at WSU.
The school added assistants in Jimmie Bunting and DeVante Wilson. Bunting oversaw strength and conditioning at FCS McNeese State last season. Wilson, a former defensive end at Cal, founded Grind Time Performance in Corona, California.
Recruiting/operations
Marco Regalado, the Cougars’ on-campus recruiting director last season, has been promoted to recruiting director. He replaces Josh Omura, who accepted a job at Arizona earlier this month.
Regalado had previously worked in various roles at the prep level over the past five years in his home state of Texas.
The Cougars hired a scouting director in Justin Kramer, who spent the past two seasons as tight ends coach at FCS Southeast Missouri State. He coordinated the offense at FCS Missouri State in 2019 after three seasons in charge of the Bears’ tight ends and special teams. He was an analyst at Mizzou prior to that.
Former University of Idaho nickels coach Ray Clark joins WSU’s staff as a defensive high school scout.
Brent Vernon, Wyoming’s associate athletic director for football operations in 2021, was announced earlier this month as WSU’s new chief of staff.
Third-year staffer Ryan Robinson will be the Cougars’ director of football operations for the second season. Ashley Watkins enters her second year as an assistant director of football ops. After apparently missing the 2021 season for unclear reasons, Rob Schlaeger is back for his second year as director of player personnel at WSU.
Analysts/GAs/quality control
Offensive analyst Jordan Davis and grad assistant Sean Brophy followed Eric Morris to the Palouse out of Incarnate Word.
Morris was recently hired as WSU’s offensive coordinator following a four-year stint at the helm of UIW’s FCS program in San Antonio. Davis served as Morris’ assistant head coach while tutoring the Cardinals’ receivers over the last three years. Brophy was a reserve quarterback under Morris from 2017-19.
The Cougars’ first-year defensive coordinator also brought an analyst in Trent Greene, a defensive quality control staffer at Nevada last year under Brian Ward, who was hired last month to take over as WSU’s DC.
Greene, a two-time All-MAC linebacker at Bowling Green, got his coaching start as a grad assistant at Syracuse in 2017. He moved on to the prep ranks a couple of years later before landing a gig in Reno.
The Cougars looked 7 miles east and found a new defensive quality control assistant in Adam Breske, who mentored the University of Idaho’s linebackers for the past four years and supervised its special teams for the past three. Breske was left without a job when the Vandals parted ways with longtime coach Paul Petrino in November.
Breske’s father, Mike, coordinated WSU’s defense under coach Mike Leach from 2012-15 before a seven-year tenure as Idaho’s DC.
Four staffers return – Justin Mesa (offensive quality control), Max Silver (defensive GA), Mac Alexander (defensive GA) and Dan Ferrigno (special teams quality control).
Mesa spent 2021 as the Cougars’ director of transfer recruiting, a now-defunct position. He got his start at USC, where he stayed from 2007-12, serving in a variety of coaching and administrative roles. Mesa has experience as a prep head coach and worked as Wyoming’s director of player personnel from 2017-18.
Silvers enters his third year on the Palouse after three years as a defensive assistant at D-II Eastern New Mexico. Alexander, also a third-year staffer, formerly coached safeties at Tarleton State, then a D-II school.
Ferrigno had been an on-field offensive assistant throughout the second half of WSU’s 2021 season, after Rolovich and four assistants were fired in mid-October. A veteran in the coaching profession, Ferrigno will return to a behind-the-scenes function and help out with Cougars specialists. The journeyman assistant’s resume features jobs at Michigan, USC, Oregon, Oregon State and Cal, among other programs.
Digital media
WSU augmented an already impressive media room with the addition of Dallas Hobbs, a multifaceted creator and five-year defensive tackle for the Cougars who recently announced that he had decided to step away from the game to pursue other ventures. Hobbs signed on to become a digital media specialist at WSU.
The program returns all the same staffers who made the Cougars’ social media platforms entertaining all year.