Inside WSU coach Jake Dickert’s playing days, which prepared him for the challenge of being the Cougs’ head man

PULLMAN — Brett Borchart felt a little uneasy when he heard his Wisconsin-Stevens Point coaches call out his name. The Pointers were in the middle of practice, early in the 2004 season, and they needed a backup holder for place-kicks.

They figured Borchart would make a good candidate. He was the team’s starting quarterback, after all, and he would already be on the field when the special teams unit came on.

“Just in case Jake can’t do it,” coaches said. “If he gets hurt or whatnot.”

That would be Jake Dickert, head coach at Washington State today, backup quarterback behind Borchart back then. He was also the team’s main holder. On this day of practice, though, coaches wanted to establish some depth at the position.

Feeling nervous because he had never held a place-kick in his life, Borchart took a knee a few yards behind the team’s long snapper. On his first practice rep, he caught the ball, put it down, tried to spin the laces out. He looked up at the team’s kicker, who had stopped in his tracks.

“I can’t kick that,” he told Borchart, who had put the ball down about a full foot away from where the kicker could boot it.

Over came Dickert, who offered some pointers. Here’s how you do it. Here’s how you mark your spot. Here’s how you hit your spot. After a few weeks of practice, Borchart got the hang of it.

“That’s Jake,” Borchart said. “Our coaches didn’t teach me how to do it. Jake did.”

“Jake being involved in mentoring Brett as a backup quarterback,” said Jesse Dickert, Jake’s older brother, “you could start seeing some of that coaching prowess come out of him.”

But Dickert wasn’t just helping out any teammate. He was giving advice to the guy who had passed him up. To those who played with Dickert, to those who know him best, there’s no better way to capture his ascent from Division III player to Division I head coach.

***

Dickert was recruited to Division III Stevens Point, a small school in central Wisconsin, as a quarterback, the position he starred at in high school, first at Oconto High and then at Kohler. He spent his freshman season at Stevens Point as an understudy to all-conference selection Scott Krause, who went on to play in the Canadian Football League, then figured it would be his time as a sophomore.

That’s when Borchart transferred in, prompting Pointers coaches to put on a quarterback competition ahead of the season. Borchart won the job, making Dickert the backup, a frustrating setback for the 20-year-old.

“It was tough to let go of something you’ve done your whole career,” Dickert said, according to a Stevens Point Journal article from November 2006. “I didn’t want to give up on my dream of playing college football.”

Dickert did nothing of the sort. He blossomed into Stevens Point’s leader, the guy everyone looked up to. He captured his teammates’ attention in the weight room, in the locker room, on the practice field, where he valued the team’s success enough to help out the guy who had just transferred in and taken the job he thought would be his.

Twenty years later, Dickert and Borchart consider each other close friends.

Nobody who knew Dickert growing up has been surprised to see his rise, which began with a GA year at Stevens Point and after eight stops has led him to Pullman, where he has guided the Cougars to a second straight 4-0 start to the season. Ahead of WSU’s next contest, a road test against No. 25 Boise State and star running back Ashton Jeanty on Saturday evening, Dickert’s quick ascension has zoomed into focus.

It started in earnest when he was playing Division III ball, all because he has stayed the same guy, his friends and family say: Relentless competitor. Natural leader. Ready to make changes, sacrifices, whatever the Pointers needed to win their next game.

That began with the decision Dickert made ahead of the 2005 season. Acknowledging the writing on the wall, understanding Borchart was the man at quarterback, Dickert moved to wide receiver. He thought about transferring – he even took a visit to Division III Concordia University in Wisconsin in the offseason – but in the end, he decided to stay.

Why not? He was playing with his brother, Jesse, the Pointers’ starting center. He didn’t dislike Stevens Point, he was just a little disappointed about getting passed over for the starting quarterback’s role. He just wanted to play, wanted to win, which is why he chose to stick it out and transition to receiver.

For every play he made at that spot, Dickert commanded his teammates’ attention with his leadership, his competitiveness showing like flames out of a campfire. In one sequence during a 2005 game, Borchart dropped back and targeted Dickert, but three times in a row, Borchart’s throw fell short. After the last one, Dickert kicked the ball away and glared at Borchart.

“Like, what the heck, man?” Borchart said of the reaction. “But that’s just Jake’s competitive nature. Like, ‘Why aren’t you getting me this ball right now,’ you know? And he comes back in the huddle and I’m like, ‘Dude, Jake, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I can’t hit you on that pass.’

“But we could do that to each other. You could get on each other a little bit because we knew our expectations toward each other, and when it didn’t always go right, Jake was kind of good at being serious, but also joking with you at the same time, so I always appreciated that about him.”

At his best, Dickert was one of the best receivers in the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, using his nose for the ball and his penchant for finding the seams in defenses to pile up 47 catches for 786 yards, an average reception of 16.7 yards, as a junior. That season, he was named the team’s wide receiver of the year.

Dickert did the same a year later, when he really broke out. For their season opener in 2006, the Pointers traveled to Texas to take on Hardin-Simmons, whose student sections line the end zones. In there, fraternity guys would bring pots and pans and create a raucous environment – “They were just banging the absolute hell out of these things,” said Dale Bratz, UWSP’s left tackle – but it hardly fazed Dickert.

Right before halftime, Borchart dropped back, spotted Dickert angling toward the end zone and lofted a pass his way. Dickert shuffled his feet, leapt and made a one-handed catch for a touchdown, securing the Pointers’ first points of the game.

“We’re going against one of the top teams in Division III,” Bratz said, “and here’s Jake Dickert in our first game as seniors coming out there saying, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and set the tone for the season and make this incredible catch in the corner of the end zone.’ ”

“Even though I was the quarterback, I think most of us saw Jake more as a leader,” Borchart said. “I wasn’t always the most verbal person like Jake was. Jake would always be the one ready to give a speech, ready to get the guys going, talk at halftime, whatever it may be. Jake was always that kind of guy, so I think that was kind of a blessing to have Jake just step up.”

The other part of what makes Dickert the right guy at the right moment for WSU, at the center of a changing Pac-12 and football ecosystem, happened when he was a senior.

***

It was 2 a.m. on a Saturday, hours before the UWSP team bus was scheduled to leave for a road game against Trinity International in Illinois, and Dickert woke up with a pain in his stomach area. He called Jesse, his older brother by two years, and told him he needed to go to the hospital.

When Dickert arrived, doctors quickly recognized the problem: Dickert had appendicitis, an urgent condition that occurs when the appendix becomes inflamed and swollen, often due to a blockage. That night, he underwent surgery to remove his appendix.

“We’re devastated. We’re missing our No. 1 guy,” Borchart said. “I do remember being shocked. I had never had anybody go through that before.”

Two days later, after the team returned from what turned into a blowout win, coach John Meich and a few teammates visited Dickert in the hospital, Jesse among them. Meich, known around the school as a jokester, started telling Dickert funny stories, going on for some 30 minutes, making the receiver laugh and laugh and laugh.

One problem: When you’re recovering from appendix surgery, you’re still in pain. You have stitches along your abdomen. Watching near the bed, Jesse worried if his brother was about to jar his loose.

“We had to cut coach’s jokes off, because Jake was starting to get too sore at the time,” Jesse said. “We’re like, ‘Coach, coach, he isn’t supposed to be laughing.’ ”

“Here’s Jake laughing in bed while in pain,” Borchart added. “Basically, like, ‘Coach, you gotta go, man, you are killing me right now.’ ”

Soon enough, though, Dickert’s teammates weren’t laughing. They were watching in amazement. Two weeks later, he returned to practice, wearing extra-large pads in his abdominal region to protect the sore spot. “He looked like he could have played O-line with those rib pads on,” Jesse said.

Dickert played in that weekend’s game, making six catches for 56 yards in a narrow conference loss to River Falls. He missed just two weeks from appendix surgery, a remarkably quick turnaround. Typically, doctors recommend taking several weeks to rest – and that’s for normal citizens, not college football players.

“The minute he could be back on that field, he was gonna be back on that field,” Jesse said. “Jake’s pretty humble when he talks about it. He’s like, ‘I wasn’t very good.’ I mean, you go have your appendix taken out, and then the rest of the year you lead the league in receptions per game. You were pretty decent.”

More important, those around Dickert understood that he had a quality to make him a successful head coach: Adversity didn’t shake him. He was always going to figure out a way. How to get on the field after getting passed up at quarterback. How to return to action weeks after undergoing surgery.

It’s prepared Dickert for his WSU coaching career, for all the issues he could never have foreseen when he joined Nick Rolovich’s staff in early 2020. In October 2021, Rolovich was fired for not complying with the state COVID-19 vaccine mandate, and Dickert went from defensive coordinator to interim head coach. Days after WSU took down rival Washington for the Cougars’ first Apple Cup victory since 2012, Dickert was named full-time head coach, the first head coaching job of his career.

Not two years later, Dickert ran into another round of circumstances he never could have seen coming. Last August, 10 Pac-12 schools departed the conference and left only WSU and Oregon State, a brutal wave of conference realignment that has left Washington State in one of the most challenging times in school history.

“The way he’s handled all that stuff is just how he was growing up, right from day one,” Jesse said. “We’re gonna find a way to win. We’re gonna find a way to be successful, and we’re gonna be victorious. Those sorts of things, he’s always had those traits. You can see them day in and day out at WSU, the way he’s building the program.”

Dickert can’t do much about the changes in the Pac-12, which has added five Mountain West Conference schools to make seven members (one short of the necessary eight), but he can win games. He’s done plenty of that this fall.

The Cougars’ latest victory, a double-overtime win over San Jose State on Friday, might best capture the way he’s ralled his team around his mantra: Find a way. At one point, WSU trailed by two touchdowns. The Spartans took the lead with a shade under than 30 seconds to go.

But Washington State found a way, same as Dickert did when he was in his early 20s. After the game, which ended well after midnight Central Time, Borchart pulled out his phone and sent his friend a text.

I know it probably gave you a heart attack, Borchart wrote. I stayed up till 1:30 to watch that game, and it was well worth it. It was one of the most entertaining games I’ve ever watched. Great win.

Later that night, Dickert texted back: That was crazy and unreal. I appreciate it.

“I don’t expect much more,” Borchart said. “He’s a busy man. I don’t always expect him to get back to me. I just want him to know I’m watching him, and I’m proud of him.”