Roland Smith, Ernie Padron win Herald’s Miami-Dade County Lifetime Achievement Awards
Two longtime, championship-winning Miami-Dade County coaches ended their high school-coaching careers this year.
Roland Smith, who won seven football state championships at Miami Central and Northwestern, left Miami-Dade County Public Schools after more than 28 years to return to his alma mater on the coaching staff of the Miami Hurricanes.
Ernie Padron, who won two Class 2A baseball championships at Florida Christian, is retiring from coaching after more than 30 years of leading programs across Miami-Dade County.
They’re both now also recipients of the Miami Herald’s Miami-Dade County Lifetime Achievement Award.
“It was a fun ride and I do miss it,” Smith said, “but, at some point, it had to come to an end.”
Smith, 52, led the Bulls to their second state title back in 2006 — he was the first alumnus to ever coach Northwestern — and set the foundation for a dynasty in Miami. The Bulls won again in 2007 without Smith and then added three more from 2017 to 2019.
With the Rockets, Smith helped build the same sort of dynasty. He returned to coaching in 2013 and immediately led Central to a second consecutive state title. He then won two more in 2014 and 2015, and was riding another three-peat with the Rockets when he decided to leave for the Hurricanes in February.
His seven Florida High School Athletic Association titles are tied with former Fort Lauderdale St. Thomas Aquinas coach George Smith for the most in South Florida history. Only two coaches in the state have more.
His lasting legacy, however, will be how he helped transform so-called “inner-city” Miami-Dade football into the high school powerhouse it is now. Central’s eight FHSAA championships are tied for fifth most, Northwestern’s seven are tied for seventh, Booker T. Washington’s six are tied for 10th and Carol City’s five are tied for 16th.
All four are now coached by men who either played for Smith or were assistant coaches for him.
Smith still thinks back to an opportunity he had during one of his first days as the Bulls’ coach in 2001 when he spent a day with former Chiefs coach Walt Frazier and got to pick his brain about how he turned Carol City into a powerhouse, with back-to-back state titles in 1996 and 1997, and, later, another in 2003.
“He was a guy that I respected so much, a guy who I wanted to pattern my program behind,” Smith said. “I’m very excited about the young people who I was able to touch coming up as a coach.”
Padron, 55, started coaching in Miami back in 1990, first, briefly, as the junior varsity coach at Miami High and then at LaProgresiva Presbyterian.
His entryway into coaching was mostly happenstance. He never played above JV for the Stingarees, but he spent a lot of time around practices when he was 22 and still working toward his degree from St. Thomas University because his younger brother was playing. Eventually, former Stingarees coach Ron Rodriguez, who happened to be Padron’s seventh-grade civics teacher at Citrus Grove Middle School, asked Padron if he wanted to be the JV coach. Padron gave it a shot.
A year later, he took over at LaProgresiva and led the Knights to the 1991 Class A semifinals in his second season.
LaProgresiva had no home field to host games and nowhere on campus to practice, and Padron turned the Knights into an unlikely contender.
“I’m a 24-year-old coach with a team in the state final [four] and I have no idea how we got here,” Padron said, “but I do know that still I talk to some of these guys, and what they say that I instilled in them was work ethic and passion to do the things correctly.”
Padron’s coaching career took him all over the county, including stops at Dade Christian, Coral Reef, TERRA Environmental and, most recently, Coral Gables, where he’ll continue to teach. He also won three gold medals with the 16U USA Baseball team as the pitching coach in 2008 and 2009, and the manager in 2011.
His time with the Patriots, however, solidified his place as one of the best coaches in Miami, as he led Florida Christian to back-to-back 2A championships in 2004 and 2005, and two more trips to the title game in 2002 and 2006.
His main philosophies were the work ethic he stressed dating back to his time at LaProgresiva and a fearlessness to put together the toughest schedules possible, even though none of the schools he coached were traditional powers.
“We didn’t shy away from anybody, we would play a schedule that people are better than us, just to make us better,” Padron said. “We always talked about, You play for May, because that’s where you really put all your work into.”
