How patience paid off for new Washington coach Jimmy Lake

SEATTLE — Jimmy Lake cried with his wife, Michele, when they found out they had to leave Seattle.

“I still remember driving away in the U-Haul, everything packed up,” Lake recalled in August 2016, reflecting on a single season spent coaching Washington’s defensive backs. “That was a sad day.”

No, this isn’t an alternate timeline to the Chris Petersen era. This was November 2004, after Lake, along with the rest of Keith Gilbertson’s UW staff, had been fired amid a 1-10 season. Lake knew he was taking a risk when he left a similar gig at Eastern Washington to help coach the Huskies. UW went 6-6 in 2003 and missed out on a bowl, and the program was on shaky ground. But Lake felt he couldn’t turn down an opportunity to coach in the Pac-10 — he was 28 years old, after all — so he headed west for what turned out to be a rather brief tenure in Seattle.

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It was a difficult lesson to learn, but a lesson all the same: The grass isn’t always greener, and “better” is in the eye of the beholder.

Maybe Lake had that in mind during his second stint at Washington, which began in 2013 when he accompanied Petersen on his move from Boise State. As Lake built the Huskies’ secondary into one of the nation’s best, high-profile suitors approached each offseason to try to pry him away. Petersen fought back with UW’s considerable resources. He promoted Lake to coordinator, gave him play-calling duties when co-coordinator Pete Kwiatkowski voluntarily ceded them and bumped Lake’s salary until he became the Pac-12’s highest-paid assistant.

Given those circumstances — and his affinity for the area, which allows a short boat ride to work from his Bellevue home in the summertime — it figured that Lake would be choosy with his next move. He always wanted to be a head coach, and wasn’t shy about saying so. But he was only going to leave for the right opportunity, for someplace with an existing infrastructure conducive to winning big.

Like Washington, for example.

Petersen shocked the college football world Monday with his decision to step down as UW’s coach after six seasons. Less shocking was UW athletic director Jen Cohen’s decision to name Lake as his replacement — not on an interim basis, mind you, but as the next coach of the Washington Huskies, period.

The Huskies would not have been able to keep Lake on staff this long if not for their ability to bump his pay and better his duties and title, but maybe Lake also knew his surest route to becoming a head coach — and becoming a head coach somewhere he could win right away — was to stay at Washington as Petersen’s heir apparent. Lake told me in August 2016, just before the Huskies embarked upon a breakthrough season that put them back on the map, that he had learned to be patient in regard to his career progression.

“I just know if I continue to do my job and try to do it with excellence — recruit, make sure my players are being productive — then to me, everything will take care of itself,” Lake said then. “And what’s awesome is I feel like I’m beneath the best head coach in football, so every day for me is a learning experience.

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“I have notebooks on notebooks of notes taken on how ‘Coach Pete’ handles different situations, and to me, that will definitely help me down the road if that opportunity ever presents itself.”

For that reason, it’s fair to expect Lake’s program to resemble Petersen’s in a few obvious ways. You can’t work for Petersen as long as Lake has — since the 2012 season — without buying into his “Built For Life” philosophy, and Cohen values that approach too much to hire someone who doesn’t. Petersen and Lake greatly admire one another, and Lake is a true student of the game. He spent five seasons in the NFL, coaching defensive backs with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Detroit Lions, and still visits other NFL teams as a matter of professional development. A trip to New England in 2017, for example, yielded several new ideas for Lake to add to his notebooks.

That said, Lake’s public persona has at times been the opposite of Petersen’s. That’s not a bad thing. Sure, Lake probably shouldn’t have so thoroughly dissed Washington State’s offensive philosophy after the 2018 Apple Cup (and after the 2015 Apple Cup and after the 2017 Apple Cup), but you’ll take such outbursts in a heartbeat in exchange for Lake’s round-the-clock energy and passion. Players tend to emulate the attitude of their coach, and Lake has managed to promote within the DB room a culture of positivity and extreme self-confidence without losing the even-keel mentality necessary for focused preparation. If there is one unit on UW’s team that has consistently played with an obvious swagger informed by unrelenting belief in their preparedness, it’s the defensive backs. That’s no coincidence.

It’s become tradition each year for Lake to gather the team’s defensive backs to watch the NFL Draft because so many of their former teammates — Budda Baker, Sidney Jones, Kevin King, Byron Murphy, Taylor Rapp, Jordan Miller — have heard their names called.

When Jones, a two-time, All-Pac-12 cornerback, developed a reputation as a film junkie, his teammates dubbed him “Sidney Lake” because he spent so much time in the coach’s office. That’s the kind of culture Lake strives to create: He is a high-level teacher who praises freshmen for asking questions and beams when he talks about players texting him immediately after games to ask for the next week’s game plan.

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“We don’t just learn techniques with our scheme,” former UW defensive back Darren Gardenhire told me in 2016. “We focus on football — this split, each release, learning how to read formations, shot formations, just reading everything from splits to routes to concepts. … I feel like we’re one of the smarter secondaries in the country because of him.”

Lake has proven himself one of UW’s top recruiters, too. The son of an Air Force veteran, he credits his upbringing — moving from city to city — for his ability to drop into most any surrounding and quickly relate to people. He was born in San Francisco, but also spent five years each in Turkey and the Philippines before settling in Spokane and attending North Central High.

Lake adored baseball but knew he was a better football player, and accepted a scholarship offer to play at Eastern Washington, where he played safety and was a team captain as a senior in 1998. Before his coaches convinced him to stay on as a student assistant while he finished his degree, Lake, a business major, figured he “was going to go off and run my own company somewhere. That was my goal.”

He goes back a long way with Kwiatkowski, coaching with him at four schools (EWU and Montana State, in addition to Boise State and UW). When Petersen first hired Lake at Boise State, he said he asked Kwiatkowski, “ ‘Would you stand on the table for this guy?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely, no doubt.’ ” It figures that Kwiatkowski will resume his defensive coordinator position, even if Lake remains heavily involved in the game planning on that side of the ball.

For the first time in his career, Lake will get to mold the offense how he sees fit, too, a direction that will be determined by any staff changes he might choose to make. He’ll have one assistant to hire, at least, with Petersen stepping away.

Standing on the Husky Stadium turf after Friday’s 31-13 over Washington State in the Apple Cup — the Huskies’ seventh consecutive victory over their rivals — Lake watched his players celebrate in customary fashion, posing for a group photo with the Apple Cup trophy. He was at the center of that snapshot, but otherwise had the look of a bemused bystander, allowing UW’s players to revel while he opted this time to stay in the background.

I asked him, in that moment, if he had anything he wanted to say about the victory, given his choice words in previous seasons. He shook his head no, then smiled and said, “Go Dawgs.”

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Two days later, he signed a memorandum of understanding to become UW’s next coach, finding that green grass right where he already was standing.

(Top photo: Christopher Mast / Icon Sportswire via AP Images)

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