CALGARY — Dave Dickenson didn’t need much time to get used to being the man in charge.

The Calgary Stampeders’ rookie head coach is taking his first season as a CFL bench boss in stride, making a seamless transition from quarterback to coordinator to head coach.

“It’s just kind of natural for me at this point,” Dickenson told James Cybulski in an exclusive interview on CFL.ca’s The Waggle Podcast. “I kind of like being in charge; I like making decisions – I do, that’s the way it is.

“But it’s still a team effort,” he added, “It really is and I still lean on Huff and I think the assistant coaches have a lot to do with whether a head coach is a good coach because they do a lot of the grunt work.”

Listen to the complete interview below:

After a prolific career at the University of Montana, Dickenson played 10 years in the CFL winning three Grey Cups, one Most Outstanding Player honour as well as a Grey Cup MVP. In 2015 he was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, seven years into his career as a coach.

Now just 43 years old, Dickenson has taken over the reins of a perennial Grey Cup contender from a coaching legend in John Hufnagel.

“I feel good about it,” said Dickenson. “Our team is young, I think we’ve got some good young parts though — in fact I think we’re getting better and that’s always an exciting thing.

“I think we’ve got a chance to do something this year, we just have to grow into it and find our way.”

After winning a championship on the sidelines as a player in 2008 with the Stamps, Dickenson captured his fourth Grey Cup Championship in 2014 as the Stampeders’ offensive coordinator. It was that night that Hufnagel revealed he’d hand over his duties as head coach to Dickenson while remaining the team’s general manager in 2016.

On The Waggle, Dickenson told Cybulski, among other things, about the challenges of being a head coach in professional football.

“The thing about it that’s hard is you’re doing it every day – there’s no weekend,” said Dickenson, who starts his days around 6 a.m. and sometimes goes as late as 10 p.m. “You don’t have your two days off as a coach — the most time you have off is the day before the game and you’re usually scouting the next opponent; or the day of the game, which you’ve got usually some stress and you’re trying to organize your thoughts even though you’re off and you’re not doing anything.”

Dickenson says the biggest piece of advice Hufnagel gives him is ‘just be yourself’, which as a coach he does. Still, the two work together daily on X’s and O’s — an advantage the current head coach says he’s privileged to have.

“I still learn from Huff to this day; I ask ‘what do you think of that, Huff, I know you’ve run that concept more than I have’ – I still learn stuff from him on a daily basis just on football and actual scheme and X’s and O’s.”