Bio

Jake Lords enters his first season as the head coach of the men's wrestling team in the 2025-26 season. 

In Lords' first season, Baker finished sixth in the team standings at the Heart Championships and extended its 17-year streak of having at least three wrestlers qualify for the NAIA postseason. The four national qualifiers marked the program's most in three years.

Lords joins the Wildcats after spending the last four seasons at Carl Albert State College, a junior college located in Poteau, Okla., where he started the men's and women's wrestling programs for the Vikings, while also serving as the Athletic Director since the fall of 2021.

Since building the programs at CASC, which included establishing the second women's collegiate wrestling program in the state of Oklahoma, Lords has coached four NJCAA national champions, seven national finalists, 26 NJCAA All-Americans and 74 national qualifiers between the two teams.

Lords was just named NJCAA Women's National Coach of the Year by the National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA) on March 10 after leading a Vikings women's squad that reached No. 2 in the national rankings this past season. He was a finalist for the NJCAA Men's Coach of the Year award in 2022 as a first-year coach.

Prior to his time at Carl Albert, Lords was an assistant coach for NCAA Division II school Minnesota State-Moorhead for two seasons, receiving his Master's in Educational Leadership from MSUM while coaching for the Dragons.