Minium: New ODU Cornerbacks Coach Dwike Wilson Has Deep Wisdom Learned From His Ancestors
By Harry Minium
NORFOLK, Va. – Dwike Wilson was a 15-year-old high school sophomore when he realized his calling in life. He was a pretty fair high school football player in Vicksburg, Mississippi, who looked up to his coaches and the difference they made in his life.
“I wanted to have the same impact on young men,” he said.
He went to his grandfather, then a minister, and asked him what he thought about his decision.
“He told me that I likely would affect more lives as a coach than he did as a preacher,” Wilson said.
Now, more than two decades later, he’s still changing lives at Old Dominion University.
Wilson was recently hired to coach ODU’s cornerbacks, and at age 47, he’s the “old guy” on a staff that has been known for its youth since Ricky Rahne was hired as the head coach in 2019.
Rahne was one of the youngest head coaches in FBS, and then put together a staff that was the youngest in FBS. Wilson is now ODU’s oldest coach.
“He's not really old and he doesn’t coach like he’s old, not the way he runs around the field,” said Rahne on Thursday, the first day of spring practice.
“I love having Dwike. He’s an unbelievable teacher and a great communicator, which allows him to be a terrific recruiter.
“His connections all over the country are second to none and just watching him coach and develop relationships with our corners has been pretty awesome.”
Even at 47, Wilson carries himself with a wisdom that seems older than his years. Perhaps that is because of his family history and the lessons he learned passed down through the generations.
Mississippi, as with much of the nation, has a regrettable history of race relations dating back hundreds of years.
“When people ask who I am, I say I'm Dwike Wilson from Vicksburg, Mississippi,” he said. “My dad was named Willie Wilson and he was a welder. My grand-daddy was a preacher and my great grand-daddy was a sharecropper."
His great great grandfather was a slave.
“So, you’re going to have a different kind of mentality when it comes to a Wilson man, a man who’s been through all of those steps and learned so many lessons from those who came before me," he said.
“We’re going to pray to God like it depends on him but we’re going to work like it depends on us.
“When you’re a sharecropper, you work the fields and live in the house as long as you can work, and when you get too old to work, you have to move out of the house.
“We learned from that. We tried to buy property. We saved money.
“You have to have the mindset to take care of the right things, the important things, regardless of what it takes.”
That focus on doing the important thing was apparent after his sophomore season playing at Hinds Community College in Mississippi.
He helped lead Hinds to a state championship and had several full scholarship offers from FCS schools, but instead chose to give up his playing career to become a student assistant at Ole Miss.
At Ole Miss, he worked for then head coach David Cutcliffe, who had coached Peyton Manning and recently signed Eli Manning. He worked with coaches now working all over the NFL, SEC and ACC.
“I was always one of those guys who was driven and told you what I was going to do,” he said. “In the 11th grade, I had my goals for the next five years done, something I have my players do now.
“I knew I wasn’t going to the NFL. I wanted to get into my thing, to coach. I thought going to Ole Miss would speed it up.”
Wilson has a diverse football background full of success, much of it on the junior college level, an area that ODU has been emphasizing in recruiting. He coached for nearly a decade at Mississippi junior colleges with later stops at North Carolina A&T and Murray State.
Then, in 2019, he got a big break when Indiana hired him as director of player personnel and high school relations. He worked two seasons with the Hoosiers, before moving onto to South Alabama and then back to his home state at Southern Miss.
He revamped Indiana’s social media.
“People think of Bloomington as the limestone capital of the world and that it is gray all of the time,” Wilson said. “There’s actually a lot of nice weather there.
“We got that message out, that at times it’s 73 degrees and sunny. It gave players a different mindset.”
ODU Defensive Coordinator Blake Seiler, then at Kansas State, met Wilson while recruiting junior college players in Mississippi.
“When I met him, I thought, ‘man this guy has his stuff together.’” Seiler said. “When he was at Hinds, he was the glue that kind of kept that entire program going.
“It was no surprise to me when he was hired at Indiana and I’m so glad he’s here now. He’s doing a great job.”
Wilson has been at ODU nearly two months and has been back to Mississippi only once during that time to see his wife, Anntwan and sons, Dwike Jr. and Daniel.
“Being married to a football coach can be a hard life,” Wilson said. “But my wife is a trooper and my guys are troopers.
“My wife, she’s a single parent right now. When I ask, ‘What’s going on there,’ she said, I’ve got this.’
“When I was growing up, we’d go on vacation maybe every other year for three days and we didn’t go far. But my kids, they’ve lived in Indiana, they’ve lived all over the place and will soon live in Virginia.
“They kind of take pride in this, in being part of a football program. They’ve been on bowl trips. They love it.”
Wilson, who has coached nearly two dozen players who made it to the NFL, will, of course, be ODU’s recruiting coordinator with Mississippi’s many junior colleges.
But he has also been charged with recruiting the Richmond area, a key recruiting hotspot for ODU. That shows that Rahne has immense trust in his newest coach.
“I’ve dug in there already,” he said of Richmond. “We’ve got one kid committed already and we’re working on some more.”
He said ODU has a ton to sell recruits.
“The facilities here are great,” he said. “Everyone knows that.
“I walk five miles every morning and you can walk behind our facility on the golf course and look at water, three blocks away from campus.
“We have beaches and the harbor. It’s just an awesome place to live.
“I love the kids here. They’re great kids. They’re eager to learn.
“And we’ve got talent here. We’ve got to get them confident and got to get them to show some swagger. But we're going to be fine."
Even though he is more than a thousand miles away from his home state, there will always be a bit of Mississippi that he carries with him. He has the obituary for his grandfather on the wall of his office at the L.R. Hill Sports Complex and carries the lessons he learned from his ancestors with him.
“That’s one thing I wouldn’t trade about Mississippi,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade my growing up there for nothing.
“I learned so much about life and being successful.”
Lessons he’s now passing onto his cornerbacks.
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Minium is ODU’s senior executive writer. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram