A former high school wrestling champion-turned-coach in the Amarillo Independent School District is facing 10 years to life in federal prison after pleading guilty to having sex with a student he groomed for months via thousands of texts.
Nicholas Jade “Nick” Herrmann was arrested in January 2025 and charged with improper relationship between educator and student, a state felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in a Texas prison.
He was hit with a federal charge in May 2025 and has remained in the Randall County Jail without bond ever since.
Herrmann pleaded guilty last week to one federal count of enticement of a minor.
At the time of his first arrest, Herrmann was an assistant boys’ wrestling coach at Tascosa High School but was allowed to resign when the allegations surfaced.
From February 2024 through January 2025, Herrmann reportedly exchanged more than 4,000 text messages with the student he targeted and eventually enticed into having sex with him.
According to a report by ABC7 in Amarillo, the girl initially denied the allegations and showed administrators her phone, which “revealed no text messages between the two.”
School administrators notified Amarillo ISD’s own police department, but Herrmann “refused to speak with the police chief and drove away from the school with his phone.”
The girl’s parents found an iPad at their home that contained copies of iPhone text messages from Herrmann and turned the iPad over to the Amarillo Police Department.
The girl was interviewed a second time and “admitted the relationship was more than just coach and student. She told police that Herrmann had sex with her three times: twice on January 25 and once on January 26.”
The coach was arrested on January 31, 2025.
Herrmann was a state champion wrestler while he was a student at Tascosa High School from 2009-2012.
Online records show Herrmann began working for Amarillo ISD in 2020. He was certified in 2022 as a special education intern and received a standard teaching certification in November 2024—at the same time he was sexually grooming a student and less than three months before his arrest.
In the 2023-24 school year, Herrmann was named the 5A Assistant Coach of the Year by the Texas High School Wrestling Coaches’ Association.
Herrmann also coached wrestling at Lone Star Academy in Amarillo. Following his initial arrest, LSA said he was no longer welcome at the academy “now or in the future.”
In a similar case involving the district, a Perryton ISD coach was sent to federal prison in 2025 after sexually abusing a 15-year-old student athlete. Coach Cole Underwood had previously worked in Amarillo ISD, where he earned the nickname “Perv.” The student’s parents are suing, alleging Amarillo ISD officials knew about Underwood’s predatory behavior but “passed the trash” to Perryton High School, where Underwood had been a star student-athlete.
Texas Scorecard has reported on hundreds of Texas teachers accused of sex crimes involving students and other children in just the past few years.
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