Max Dean’s path to Washington State punter reads more like a detour through the trades than the usual Australia-to-college-football pipeline.
Before he was booming punts for the Cougars, the Gisborne, Australia, native was working in commercial plumbing, a job he said took him far away from anything like the standard football story. He started working two days a week as an apprentice in Year 10, then left school the next year to join a local plumbing company. But the work he did wasn’t the kind that sent him under sinks around town.
“I wasn’t fixing toilets or that kind of stuff,” Dean said. “I was doing above-ground drainage.”
The hours and the grind eventually wore on him. After two years, Dean said 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.”
“I was doing the hardest jobs and getting paid least,” Dean said.
That stretch of heavy labor ended up steering him somewhere unexpected. While Dean was “wheelbarrowing over rock” on a job site, family friend Matthew Goodyear - a former Fresno State punter through 2021 - pointed him toward Prokick Australia, the Melbourne-based academy that trains kickers and punters chasing college scholarships and, eventually, NFL opportunities in the United States.
From there, Dean built a routine around the academy. He trained there three days a week, then spent time on his own filming punts, tracking his stats and charting where each kick went before sending everything to Prokick coaches with college connections.
“Prokick has built that trust over the years by producing really good players,” Dean said.
The process paid off in 2024, when he landed a scholarship at New Mexico State. He spent two seasons there and saw action in his redshirt freshman year before making the move to Washington State in the offseason.
Now he’s emerged as one of the Cougars’ most effective specialists. Dean’s 44.2-yard punting average ranks 24th nationally, and first-year coach Kirby Moore has been especially taken with his accuracy.
Even with that success, Dean still sounds a little amazed by the whole ride.
“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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