Doyel: Westfield's Jake Gilbert won a football title, ran for mayor. What's next? No idea.
WESTFIELD – Someone’s knocking on a door in Westfield. Another political candidate, some guy running for this or that. The way Westfield is booming, one of the fastest-growing cities in America, who can keep up these days? He’s standing there, and he looks familiar, but most people don’t know who he is. He starts talking, and they still don’t know. Some fella by the name of Jake Gilbert.
Sounds familiar.
“I’d love to earn your support,” this man calling himself Jake Gilbert would say.
“I’m on city council,” he’d say.
“I run the Wellbeing Coalition of Westfield,” he’d say.
“I work at Westfield High School as dean of wellness,” he’d say.
“I’m also the head football coach,” he’d say, and now it clicks: Oh, that Jake Gilbert.
Wait. That Jake Gilbert?
This really happened for 14 months, from early 2022 until this May, when Westfield voters turned out for the Republican primary to essentially choose the next mayor of their conservative-leaning city. Jake Gilbert, who inherited one of Indiana’s worst football programs when he moved to Westfield in 2011, then led it to four state title appearances and the 2016 Class 5A championship, really has been running for mayor in the current election cycle.
He wasn’t running as “the football coach,” though. He ran as the sum total of a busy life: City Councillor, nonprofit president, teacher, coach, volunteer. Father, son, grandson.
Politicians need a slogan, and here’s what they chose at Jake Gilbert for Mayor:
#YouKnowJake.
Maybe, maybe not.
Childhood: 'All kinds of crazy stuff'
His players at Westfield know what they need to know about their coach’s upbringing, which is to say, whatever Jake Gilbert thinks will help them. “Circumstances,” he calls them, and he’s had a few.
“They know bits and pieces,” Gilbert, 47, says of his life story. “Kids who’ve been in similar circumstances, I’ve certainly shared mine if I think it will help. Some things I’m real open about. Some things I’ve never shared with anybody.”
Things like his time as bait on the black market, as impossible as that sounds. Things like homelessness. Like trying to meet his father, once and for all, and finding five possible names on Ancestry.com. He called three, found dead ends, and stopped. Some things nobody needs to know, not even him.
As for his mom, well, Debbie Gilbert was young and single. “A hippie-type,” Jake says, and they were on their own from the start, lighting out for California, returning to Indianapolis and bouncing around the westside.
“There were all kinds of capers, people trying to buy me and steal me – all kinds of crazy stuff,” Jake says. “It wasn’t a fit situation.”
Eventually Jake moved in with Debbie’s parents, Gene and LaVonne Gilbert. Small home near the corner of Taft and Washington. Gene drove a truck. LaVonne worked at Target.
“The good thing is, I was raised by the people that could raise me,” he says. “It was kind of a pack of wolves at times. But they cared.”
Now Gilbert is shifting to his core belief, that he didn’t get here despite of his upbringing. He’s here because of it.
“Here’s the thing,” he says. “Everyone’s got circumstances. When you go through them they’re hard, but when you come out you probably wouldn’t change a thing. A lot times that was the blessing.
“I was directly shaped by my circumstances. I’ve lived with Black families, white families. I’ve lived in the inner city, in the township, in the country. I’ve been on welfare. Obviously there are a lot of wealthy people where I live now – but not everyone, and I think that’s part of my purpose, to connect with some of those kids and fill in some of those gaps.”
He pauses.
“That’s my story,” he says, like it’s that simple.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Coaching: 'What are you talking about?'
Gilbert was the youngest head coach in Indiana in 2000 when he was hired by North Montgomery at age 24. After six years there and five as an assistant at Wabash, he came to Westfield in 2011 with a plan to turn around a team whose school was growing too fast – from Class 2A to Class 5A in 10 years – for its football program to keep pace.
“When he got here and was talking about his expectations, everybody was looking at him like he was an idiot,” senior offensive tackle Zane Burtron laughingly told the IndyStar in 2013. “It was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But over time, he got us to believe.”
The Shamrocks, who’d gone 0-10 in Class 4A under the previous staff, reached the 2013 Class 5A state finals in Gilbert’s third year, won it all in 2016 and reached Class 6A title games in 2020 and ’21. He’s 92-52 in 12 years at Westfield, where turnout in football for grades K-12 has doubled to 800 kids, including 120 on varsity this season.
“We’re talented,” he says of a roster with a program-record seven players offered Division I scholarships. “We return a lot (from last season’s 8-4 sectional champs) and we have a great group of seniors, excellent leaders, but we play tremendous teams. They’re really talented too. They’ve got great players, great seniors also.”
Westfield is breaking in a new quarterback. Cole Ballard, last year’s starter and the son of Colts general manager Chris Ballard, is at Kansas. His replacement: senior Jackson Gilbert, Jake’s son.
On the day I visit Westfield’s practice, Jackson is warming up in a light rain. Practice had started an hour early to beat the coming rain, and players are still hustling to the field. A skinny receiver is frantically tugging on gloves as he hurries past his head coach, but Jake Gilbert stops him and puts an arm around his shoulders.
“Hey,” Gilbert tells him, “you never know when you’ll need to be early, you know?”
The kid nods and trots toward his position group. He’s not frantic anymore. Floating, is more like it.
Dullaghan: 'Greatest leader I’ve had since Billy Lynch'
He went to work at age 12.
Jake been living for years with his grandparents. Nearby was his Uncle Jim, a GM factory worker and the closest thing Jake had to a father figure.
“He was the Barnabas in my life,” Jake says. “The encourager.”
Grandpa Gene sent Jake to work on a neighbor’s farm at 12: weed-eating, mowing, painting, fixing fences. Jake worked there and had other odd jobs – painting houses, busing tables at Steak ‘n Shake – and was a skinny quarterback when he showed up for freshman football tryouts for legendary Ben Davis coach Dick Dullaghan.
By his sophomore year he was blocking punts on JV and promoted to varsity, still skinny, not good enough to play quarterback and not big enough to play anywhere else. After a growth spurt he was moved to defensive end, built himself up to 210 pounds, and made all-city as a senior. He also was Ben Davis’ backup quarterback.
“He’s the greatest leader I’ve had since Billy Lynch,” Dullaghan, a Hall of Fame coach, told the IndyStar of Gilbert in 1993. By then Dullaghan had won five state championships. Lynch had played for him 20 years earlier before becoming coach at Butler, DePauw and IU.
Near the end of that 1993 newspaper story, Gilbert is quoted.
“Someday,” he said, “I’d like to be a coach.”
Dream: 'President of the United States'
“I’ve only had two dreams in my life,” Jake Gilbert says now, “and one was to become the best high school football coach in Indiana. I’m still trying to achieve that.
“The second was to be President of the United States.”
He’s serious. He was on student council at South Wayne Junior High and ran for class president at Ben Davis in 1993 (“I lost,” he says). At Wabash he was halfway toward becoming his family’s first college graduate when he started a mentoring program at Walnut Elementary School.
“It’s a Jake Gilbert project,” Wabash coach Greg Carlson told the IndyStar in 1996, “not a Coach Carlson or Wabash College project. This was initiated by one person.”
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Gilbert founded the program with 20 matches – one Wabash player, one Walnut Elementary student – and had 50 matches by his senior season. He was still undersized, playing nose guard at 230 pounds and earning honorable mention All-American, then started the pursuit of his first dream. He went into coaching, staying close to Indianapolis for Grandma LaVonne, a widow since 1993. Now 91, LaVonne lives in a nursing home in Plainfield. Jake visits regularly but he’s always busy, and then busier.
“When we won state in 2016,” he says, “you wake up the next day and: ‘Now what?' We’d worked so relentlessly on that goal, and once it was accomplished, you look for purpose. All my purpose was tied up into winning the state title, and building our program. We took a summer trip as a family to Washington, D.C. I’d prayed on this for a long time, and no one really knew, but I was considering: ‘Is it time to pivot?’”
In 2019 the high school football coach ran for Westfield City Council and won, which makes for some manic Monday nights. Twice a month he leaves practice, which ends at 6:30 p.m., and puts on a shirt and tie before heading for City Hall for the 7 p.m. city council meeting.
“I’m usually coming in hot,” he says. “Sometimes sweaty – probably not pleasant for the guy next to me.
“The city council gave me an opportunity to serve the community, which has been so good to me and our family. I could never repay what Westfield has done. It was an opportunity to serve, keep my (coaching) job and learn what it would take to be good leader in our city. I wanted to get involved politically. It was a great place to start.”
In early 2022, word spread that Westfield mayor Andy Cook wouldn’t run for reelection in 2023.
Future: 'Man plans, God laughs'
At Westfield they’re not playing for the name across the front of the practice jersey, but the word on the back:
“Family,” it says where a player’s last name usually goes.
Gilbert knows the power of family, and in 12 years at Westfield he’s seen too many people – a student manager, a trainer, players, parents – battle cancer. The Shamrocks raise money every year for the IWIN Foundation or Tackle Childhood Cancer, with JV kids often holding a bucket near the entrance to Westfield’s Riverview Health Stadium on Friday night.
Gilbert, who has served as president of the Wellbeing Coalition of Westfield and is on the board of the town’s free health Heart and Soul Clinic, started a mentoring program for Westfield upperclassmen to lead freshmen. Twice he has been named one of five national Power of Influence Award winners, as awarded each year by the AFCA “for their impact on their team, as well as the legacy they leave with the school and surrounding community.”
Which brings us to the 2023 Westfield mayoral race, in a city government described in a recent IndyStar story as “dysfunctional” and “at war with itself.”
“I ran out of love, not spite, not bitterness,” he says. “If anything I thought I could help settle those problems – the divisiveness – and be someone who lifts up the city and brings people together.”
Gilbert narrowly lost the Republican primary to City Councillor Scott Willis, who received 45% of the vote to Gilbert’s 42%. Fundraising was an issue for Gilbert, who didn’t have the appetite – or time – to ask for money. His biggest donor was Chris Ballard, who gave $2,500 for his campaign.
“The way (Gilbert) handled my son was incredible,” Ballard says. “If Cole has success in college, it’s because of Jake and his staff. They did such a great job helping him mature. The mayor deal was tough. I wanted him to win it because I think he would be great, but on the flip side I didn’t want the school to lose him because I see the impact he has on kids.”
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Gilbert isn’t sure what he’ll be doing in 2024. Could be coaching at Westfield. Could be running for office. Could be anything, really. But with his mayoral bid over and city council term expiring this fall, the 2023 Westfield football team has his full attention.
“I’m using ‘23 to have a more singular focus than I’ve had in years and really focus on this football team,” he says. “Football is not my purpose, but I am passionate about it. In my heart I feel like God will bring something new to me in ‘24. I don’t know what that will look like. It’s not out of the question that I pursue something else (politically), but I’m not actively looking at anything right now.”
Gilbert reflects on his life, his career, and remembers that saying: “Man plans, and God laughs.” He thought he was a high school coaching lifer, but was talked into interviewing for an assistant position at Wabash in 2005 and fell in love with college coaching. He interviewed for the Avon High job in 2010, didn’t get it, and decided to stick with college coaching – then stumbled onto the Westfield opening in 2011 while recruiting a kid there for Wabash.
He thought he wanted to be mayor. He thought he wanted to be President. Jake Gilbert keeps planning, and God keeps giggling.
“I’m excited about the future,” he says. “I don’t know what door will be open, but I’m happy to be head of wellness and head football coach at Westfield High. I don’t pretend to know what the future holds, but everyone will get my best.”
Probably, yes. Well, definitely yes.
#WeKnowJake.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Jake Gilbert: Westfield football coach, city councillor, mayor hopeful
