West Caldwell names Dunn new head football coach

West Caldwell High has turned to someone that already has ties to the school to lead its football program.

Former Warriors assistant coach Kyle Dunn was named on Thursday as the new head football coach.

West Caldwell principal Jeff Link also announced that Tom Thuss has been hired as the new head softball coach.

Dunn replaces Randy Baldwin, who was relieved of his coaching duties on Nov. 8.

“I spoke with Kyle last Thursday for the first time about the position,” Link said. “Then we talked again over the weekend and the early part of this week. The thing that impressed me most about him was that he had a plan in place and some of the concerns I have for our football program, he had answers for, or at least has a plan to address those.

We could have waited to see what teaching positions we were going to have available next summer but that would have really put us behind the eight ball. So after speaking with Kyle, we felt like we had the person we needed for the job.”

Dunn becomes the ninth West Caldwell head coach since the school opened and seventh since 1993.

He will inherit a program that finished 0-11 this past season, has gone 19-82 over the past nine seasons and one that has only four state playoff appearances since 1990.

“I really hadn’t thought much about returning to coach,” Dunn said. But after Mr. Link talked to me about it, I started thinking and had watched a few games knowing what they had out there. I talked with some of the assistants that were on the staff this past season that I had worked with in the past and they said they hoped to stay on to coach, so I decided I would apply for the position.”

Dunn is a graduate of Elon College, where he was a member of two NAIA National Championship football teams in 1980 and 81. He has over 20 years of assistant coaching experience at three different schools.

Dunn coached for three years at Western Alamance High and nine years at Fayetteville Douglas Byrd High. The 1995 squad at Byrd that Dunn helped coach was the state 4A runner-up and finished the season with a 14-1 record. 

Dunn came to West Caldwell in 1996 and served as an assistant football coach under Paul Hoggard and Craig Styron until 2003 before returning for a season under Mike Setzer in 2009. He was also the head coach of the wrestling team from 1999 until 2008 where he coached several regional and state qualifiers. 

Dunn is a teacher in the social studies department at West Caldwell.

“I met with the team today (Thursday) and our focal point right now is to get rid of the bad reputation football players have within the school,” Dunn said. “It’s not everyone, but just a few that makes a bad name for everyone. So first we will focus on our behavior and trying to do better in the classroom. So, my way of thinking is that if we take care of those issues then the other issues will take care of themselves.

We’re going to get busy in the weight room after Thanksgiving and already feel like we’re making some progress with putting a plan in place. The next thing we have to do is make that plan happen. Then when the time comes, we will concentrate on winning one football game, after that we will work on a second and then more, but first we have to prepare ourselves to do that.”

Thus takes over for Mark Dimeter as the girl’s softball coach and was actually introduced to the softball team as the new head coach on Oct. 26. 

A 1988 graduate of West Caldwell, he participated in football and baseball. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1991 and is a mortgage lender with Starkey Mortgage in Lenoir. 

“Tom has a vested interest in our school,” Link said. “He’s been around this community his whole life and is just an upstanding individual. We felt like our softball program for the last several years hasn’t been doing what we wanted, so we wanted the girls to have an opportunity to have a good program and believe he is the right fit.”

Thuss will be a non-faculty coach and will continue his mortgage business.     

He has been coaching softball locally for seven years and has worked with various age groups during that time. 

Since being named head coach of the Warriors’ softball program, he has generated enough interest amongst student-athletes that the school will field both a JV and varsity team for the first time in school history.