Fayetteville High is officially looking for a new head football coach, as Casey Dick resigned his post Thursday to accept a similar job in his home state of Texas.
The former Arkansas quarterback led the Bulldogs for seven seasons and compiled a 55-25 record, highlighted by an undefeated 2023 season in which they captured their sixth state title.
Dick was approved as the head coach at Rockwall-Heath High School in the DFW area Thursday night.
“This decision has not been an easy one,” Dick wrote in a letter to school administrators, coaches and players. “The time I have spent here has been among the most meaningful of my career and my life. What we have built together goes far beyond wins and losses. It is about relationships, growth, resilience and pride.”
Fayetteville athletics director Steve Janski told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette a national search is already underway and that he received so many calls from folks interested in the newly opened job Thursday that his phone died three times.
Dick, who played for the Razorbacks under Houston Nutt and Bobby Petrino from 2005-08, sent multiple players to his alma mater and other FBS programs over his tenure right down the road from the UA.
That includes a pair of incoming UA freshmen in safety Kyndrick Williams and quarterback Hank Hendrix.
The latter of those was at the center of a social media firestorm Dick set off. The four-star gunslinger reclassified and signed with Arkansas, foregoing his senior year at FHS and leaving Dick without a starting quarterback. This was reportedly done without Dick’s knowledge, which led to him declaring that Silverfield and his staff would no longer be welcome at FHS — though he later retracted that and apologized.
The 39-year-old and the new Head Hog had apparently smoothed things over since then, a fact Best of Arkansas Sports learned last Friday in a one-on-one interview in Dick’s office.
Casey Dick’s Last Words at Fayetteville
During the roughly 12-minute chat, which he initially rescheduled from the morning because he was pulled into an interview with a candidate for a junior high coaching position, the coach gave no indication he might leave in the coming days.
He even seemed excited about the new quarterback battle on his hands between rising junior Cade Rogers and soon-to-be sophomore Remington Thomas, both of whom are playing baseball this spring.
Dick seemed happy for Hendrix, who he said was an “unbelievable kid and competitor who loves to prepare and loves to go out and compete. … He’s somebody who’s going to work his tail off and figure things out at a fast rate. He’ll go out there and be successful, for sure.”
