Max Dean doesn’t have the typical Australia-to-college football story to tell as a punter at Washington State University.
It would be better summarized as a plumbing-to-punting tale - one that has taught him lessons in extreme patience and perseverance.
Dean has been one of the Cougars’ top performers this season. His 44.2-yard punting average ranks 24th in the country, but it’s been the Gisborne, Australia, native’s accuracy that has caught first-year coach Kirby Moore’s attention.
“Really good job by him,” Moore said.
But for a kid who had played Australian rules football since he was 5, American football never really came on his radar.
Plumbing, however, did.
A different kind of career path
It started in Year 10 of school when he worked two days a week as an apprentice. The next year, he dropped out of school entirely to join a local commercial plumbing company.
Now before you start thinking that Dean lived underneath kitchen and bathroom sinks, fixing pipes in homes around town - that isn’t the type of plumbing he did.
“I wasn’t fixing toilets or that kind of stuff,” Dean said. “I was doing above-ground drainage.”
Long days at laborious jobs - under extreme conditions - could wear anybody out. And in his two years of service, he admitted he got “burnt out.”
“If there was a bad job the (bosses) didn’t want to do,” Dean said, “I was the first one to go do them.”
Oh, and the pay wasn’t great - $9 to $10 per hour.
“I was doing the hardest jobs and getting paid least,” Dean said.
Trading plumbing for punting
So, one day, as Dean was “wheelbarrowing over rock” at a job site, family friend Matthew Goodyear, who punted at Fresno State until 2021, suggested he look into Prokick Australia, a Melbourne-based academy for kickers and punters who wanted to earn scholarships - and hopefully NFL jobs - in the United States.
Dean quit his plumbing job - and went for it.
Three days a week, he practiced at the academy. Then, on his own, he would record film of himself punting, record statistics and chart the direction of his punts and turn it over to Prokick coaches, who had recruiting ties to college coaches.
“Prokick has built that trust over the years by producing really good players,” Dean said.
And in 2024, Dean earned a scholarship at New Mexico State, where he stayed for two seasons - seeing action his redshirt freshman year.
In the offseason, Dean made the move to WSU, and he’s turned out to be one of the better punters in the country.
“I always get the sense of going to (big stadiums at) Washington or Kansas State, and looking around at those crowds, I ask, ‘God, what am I doing here?’” Dean said. “But I am having the time of my life.”
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