Wade seeks job
Joe Wade probably knows as well as anyone just how far from broken the Eastern Washington University football program really is – which is one of the reasons the longtime Eagles assistant wants his name to be among those considered to replace Paul Wulff as the school’s next head football coach.
Wade, 39, has spent the last eight seasons coaching running backs and wide receivers under Wulff, who left last week to take over at Washington State. And Wade has already expressed his interest in replacing his former boss to first-year Eastern athletic director Bill Chaves, who is leading the search for Wulff’s successor.
“I’m very interested in the job,” Wade said Sunday. “I’ve been here for eight years now, and I think continuity is extremely important, especially in this situation where we have so many fine young men coming back who have put in so much work to get the program to the level it’s at right now.”
Wade realizes he might seem like a longshot to land the job, considering he has no head coaching experience.
“But that doesn’t faze me in the least,” he explained. “I feel like I’ve been building toward this throughout my coaching career.”
Wade, a former quarterback and alumnus of Linfield College, spent the early stages of his college coaching career in California, where he coached quarterbacks for a year at Cal State-Hayward and wide receivers for two seasons at San Francisco State. He also served as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Fresno City College for three years, prior to coaching the secondary for Connecticut in 1998.
The following year, Wade coached running backs at Montana State for one season before landing the same job at EWU, where he spent the next seven seasons tutoring some of the Eagles’ all-time best ball carriers, including Jesse Chatman, Jovan Griffith and Darius Washington.
This fall, Wade took over Eastern’s wideouts, helping develop a young receiving corps that proved to be one of the most productive units on a team that finished 9-4 and advanced to the quarterfinals of the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision playoffs before losing to eventual three-time national champion Appalachian State.
“I’ve been around the kids who are coming back since they’ve been here, and I helped recruit a lot of them,” Wade said. “So, at the end of the day, I think it would be a very smooth transition.”
Chaves has not publicly outlined any kind of timetable as far as the coaching search is concerned, and has said he will have no further comment until a new coach is in place.