Inside WSU coach Jake Dickert’s playing days

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 moved to receiver and 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.

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.”