High School

West Florence Hires A State Championship Winning Head Coach

Chad Wilkes will lead the Knights after winning a state title at Oceanside Collegiate

Mike Duprez

Chad Wilkes, who won the 2023 Class AA state championship with Oceanside Collegiate, is the new head coach at West Florence high in South Carolina.
Chad Wilkes, who won the 2023 Class AA state championship with Oceanside Collegiate, is the new head coach at West Florence high in South Carolina. / Chad Wilkes/X.com

West Florence hired as state championship-winning Chad Wilkes as the Knights’ new football coach, the South Carolina school announced on Friday.

Wilkes coached Oceanside Collegiate Academy to the 2023 Class AA state championship before resigning shortly after the start of the 2024 season for personal reasons.

“We would like to welcome new Head Football Coach Chad Wilkes to West Florence!” said West Florence Athletics in a post on X.

This is the third stop for Wilkes as a head coach. He has previously coached at C.E. Murray and Lamar. Wilkes has six region championships and was named region coach of the year five times.

Wilkes is 66-20 as a head coach. He was 24-5 at Oceanside.

Wilkes replaces Jody Jenrette, who announced his departure, citing the driving distance, after seven highly successful years at West Florence. The Knights just completed an 8-4 season. They were 56-25 with one losing season and two 11-win campaigns. West Florence reached the third round of the Class AAAA state playoffs twice.

Jenrette was previously the head coach at Aynor for 13 years and spent 6 years as an assistant coach at Conway.

Wilkes is a graduate of Cheraw High School, where he played on two state championship football teams. He went on to play college football at New Hampshire before transferring to Clemson, where he earned his degree.

While he was at Lamar, Wilkes took the Silver Foxes to the Class A state championship twice in three seasons. Before that, he was at C.E. Murray for two seasons. 

Oceanside, a charter school in Mount Pleasant, became one of the top programs in the state under Wilkes. The Landsharks were 12-2 in 2022, reaching the Class AA state championship game where they fell to Abbeville.

In 2023, the Landsharks went 12-2 and defeated Gray Collegiate Academy 35-28 for the program’s first state championship. 

The Landsharks recently won their second straight state championship under interim head coach John Patterson.

Published
Mike Duprez
MIKE DUPREZ

Mike Duprez became a freelance sports journalist for Scorebooklive.com several months after retiring from the newspaper business. A native of Oakland, California, Duprez moved around as a child due to his father’s service in the United States Marine Corps. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1981. Duprez, who lives in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, had 30 years of experience in newspapers as well as other endeavors before retiring at the end of 2021. He covers stories in both North Carolina and South Carolina for Scorebooklive.com.

Home/South Carolina