From player to assistant to head coach, consistency is key for Washington’s Jimmy Lake
If you want to know about Jimmy Lake, you have to listen. But you wont have to listen very hard. When Mike Kramer thinks about his former safety, his voice is the first thing that comes to mind. You can hear it from across the field, from behind closed doors. He has a voice that demands attention.
Kramer — the former head coach at Eastern Washington from 1994-1999 who most recently coached at Idaho State from 2011-2016 — said Lake has never been the kind of person to demand attention. But when he speaks? Well, everyone is going to listen.
“He’s not a very big person,” Kramer said in a phone interview this month. “He’s not slight, but he has a voice where you’re like, ‘Oh my good God, stop shaking the walls with that voice, man.’”
Now, Lake’s voice is the voice of Washington football. Saturday’s Las Vegas Bowl marked Chris Petersen’s last game as the Huskies’ head coach. He’s handing the program off to Lake, his long-time assistant who first joined his staff at Boise State in 2012.
Kramer knows exactly what to expect from Lake in his new role. Most of the people who have crossed paths with Lake during his football career can say the same. He hasn’t changed much from the time he was a freshman at Eastern Washington in 1995. Ask about him, and the same adjectives will come up every time: Feisty and competitive and combative and humble and smart.
He’s the same person he’s always been. Paul Wulff — who gave Lake his first full-time job in 2000 coaching Eastern Washington’s defensive backs — said that steadiness is the driving force behind his success.
“I think leaders have to be consistent in their approach,” Wulff said. “Be who they are and be consistent. I think that consistency builds trust in people you work with. If you are all over the map, if you are emotionally really high or really low, it’s really hard to follow people like that and/or trust them. I’m a big believer in that. Jimmy’s gonna be a consistent person.”
Kramer is retired now, so he feels like he can say it: There are a lot of phony people in coaching. Petersen wasn’t one of them, he said. Lake isn’t, either. Even as he climbed the ladder through the coaching ranks — from graduate assistant at Eastern Washington to one of the top paid assistants in the country to incoming head coach at UW — Lake’s identity has never wavered.
“He’s never changed his spots,” Kramer said. “He’s never assumed the role of being an elitist. … (The Huskies) are getting a guy who’s never gonna think about the club or playing golf out at elite golf courses. You’re going to get a guy who went to North Central High School in Spokane, Washington who … played at Eastern Washington University before Eastern Washington became what Eastern Washington is today.
“I love the humbleness of Chris Petersen, and I think Jimmy dovetails that humbleness in a very positive way.”
‘He’s got the ‘it’ factor’
Eastern Washington head coach Aaron Best knows two sides of Jimmy Lake.
The two were teammates at Eastern Washington, with Best arriving a year later in 1996. They didn’t know each other then, but Lake still took it upon himself to show Best around. He told him what to expect on the road, gave him advice for how to manage class. Lake offered him tools to live by, and Best made sure to pay it forward the next season.
Best remembers that voice, too. It was often bellowing from across the field, where Lake would be informing Best and the offense just how bad they were playing. Most of the time, Best said with a chuckle, he would agree with him.
Both sides of Lake are equally important, Best said. Both have helped him get the best out of the people and players around him. He’s always been a fearless competitor — something Lake admitted with a sly grin at his family during his introductory press conference. But Best sees another quality in him, one that’s hardest to define.
“He’s got the ‘it’ factor,” Best said. “He always has. He’s always been an overachiever. He’s gotten the most of out his talent, and you put that together with the knowledge base that he has. He’s always kind of trying to grasp for knowledge, as well. He’s never not going to learn.
“When you add a highly competitive spirit to an intellectual person to a guy that’s never going to stop learning, that’s Jimmy Lake to a T. He’s a special individual.”
Kramer’s wife, Sandi, thought so, too. Back when Lake was a player, she often told her husband not to let him go into coaching. He was too smart, she said, and had the potential to excel in banking or finance or whatever path he chose.
Lake thought that was the direction he was going to take, saying earlier this month he expected to own his own business. But by 1999, Lake was a graduate assistant at Eastern Washington. He then joined Wulff’s staff in 2000. Wulff was the Eagles’ head coach from 2000-2007.
“When I hired him and gave him the first position, I had a great feeling that if anyone could handle it, he could, because of his maturity,” Wulff said. “He spent one year outside of playing. … I had very little doubt that he would handle it extremely well. I never had any reservations. It’s rare, but he handled it extremely well, just like I assumed that he would.”
‘Added more stripes’
The Huskies’ offensive players haven’t spent as much time around Lake as their defensive teammates. But senior center Nick Harris said it’s hard not to notice him on the field. He flies around practice, jumping and high-fiving and yelling. He seems to never stop moving.
“Everybody knows him,” Harris said. “Everybody knows his energy. Everybody is used to it. … He has an edge about him that I think is going to be important for the team coming up these years. All his DBs have the same edge. That’s why they’re always so good. If that happens to the whole team, they’re going to be pretty dangerous.”
Said junior cornerback Elijah Molden: “At the end of the day, the team that wins is the most competitive team. In practice a lot of the time, something will happen, and he’ll wake us up a little bit. He’ll challenge us, and that fire in him will show a little bit and then everyone else will raise their level of game.”
That fire, Best said, is always the same, whether it’s practice, a spring scrimmage or a critical conference game. Best believes that sometimes being a head coach is just in someone’s DNA. He doesn’t expect Lake to change now, to tone down some of his more outspoken comments or tame his seemingly boundless energy.
Why change, he said, when that’s exactly what got him here?
“He’s a ‘in the moment, coach ‘em when you got ‘em kind of guy,’” Best said. “Those corrective measures and that passionate spirit were evident as a player, and they were evident as a coach. He is who he is.
“He doesn’t change his stripes. He’s just added more stripes.”
