49 years, 114 state titles and thousands of people: How Smith built St. Thomas Aquinas
All George Smith knew was he was done in Indiana. He was only 23, but 23 years in the Midwest are enough to turn anyone off those winters, so the aspiring coach — about 50 years before he would actually retire as one of the most successful high school athletic directors in history — started to look around in those typical retirement destinations.
He searched for jobs in Phoenix. He trekked down to Miami and scoured schools in Fort Lauderdale. Athletic directors talked to him about football jobs and wrestling jobs, and at least a few were ready to give the 23-year-old, who had just a few years of experience coaching at a small Catholic school in Indiana, a real shot.
“I was just trying to get warm,” Smith said.
He interviewed at Monsignor Pace and Archbishop Curley in Miami-Dade County. He interviewed at Chaminade-Madonna in Hollywood. Without any meeting scheduled, he tried to drop by Cardinal Gibbons in Fort Lauderdale to interview, but no one was there to talk to him.
He wound up at St. Thomas Aquinas, which, at the time, had about 720 students, no weight room and virtually no history of football success. The Raiders made the Florida High School Athletic Association postseason once before Smith arrived — in 1971, when they won one game in the Class 2A playoffs to reach the state semifinals. They had only one FHSAA state title of any kind — a 1972 championship in girls’ tennis led by Chris Evert.
Smith started out as the founder of St. Thomas Aquinas’ wrestling program and an assistant football coach for two years before he took over the program in 1975 when he was just 25. He also became the athletic director in 1982 and oversaw 114 state championships in those 39 years.
There was nothing altogether extraordinary about the Raiders’ athletic department at the time. They weren’t picking some proven powerhouse program-builder to transform their football team and Smith wasn’t stepping to the controls of a well-oiled machine, like the one he built across 49 years in Fort Lauderdale.
When Smith arrived, the St. Thomas Aquinas’ weight room was a single multistation weight machine in the corner of the gymnasium, its wrestling room was the stage in the auditorium with the curtains drawn back and mats laid out, and its on-campus football and baseball stadiums were run by outside organizations.
In 1975, he got his hands on four weightlifting benches and took control of Brian Piccolo Memorial Stadium when the city, which built the field for a soccer league, abandoned it because “teams from out of the area were coming up here and getting drunk,” Smith said.
He had a stadium with lights and a set of bleachers he, some parents and the principal built by hand. He had the fertile South Florida talent base and, a few years later, exploding enrollment brought on when busing policies in Broward County pushed some students — Black and white — away from public schools. Above all else, he had the idea of a culture — “that’s the new buzzword,” Smith said — to build around.
“He had a crazy philosophy,” said Twan Russell, who played for Smith in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and will succeed him as athletic director. “I’m going to focus on people.”
‘A ball up a hill’
Michael Irvin was not the first NFL player to come through Smith’s Raiders. He was far from the last.
“But I was the first real hard brother they brought into the school,” the legendary wide receiver said. “That’s the best way I can put it — the first real hard, ghetto brother that they brought into the school.”
He was one of 17 children and they all lived together in a one-story house in Fort Lauderdale, sleeping in bunk bends and on floors. He spent his first two tumultuous years of high school at Piper in Sunrise — a result of those Broward busing policies — where he feuded with coaches and served a suspension at the end of his sophomore year. When he finally transferred to St. Thomas Aquinas ahead of his junior year, he worried about academics and fitting in among “rich, smart people” he assumed populated the school.
As a junior, he didn’t play — the principal at his old school accused Smith of recruiting and refused to sign a waiver to let Irvin play immediately — then, three days before Irvin’s senior year, his father died of cancer. Smith accompanied Irvin to the hospital and promised Walter Irvin he would take care of his son.
“He would catch me sometimes crying in the stall or at the game when I couldn’t play, watching the team go through whatever. He kind of talked me through it. He’s just an incredible, incredible man,” Irvin said. “Couple that with the fact that I just recently lost my father, so he really had become my father. ... He said, ‘I promise you: If you just study hard and work hard, I promise you I’m going to get you a scholarship somewhere. I don’t care if you don’t ever play a down at St. Thomas, I promise you we will get you a scholarship. We will get you ready.’ I get emotional even thinking about that right now.
“It’s not a question where I would be had it not been for George Smith.”
As a senior in 1983, Irvin blossomed from a self-described “garbage ballplayer” into one of the best wide receivers in the country and helped the Raiders reach the state semifinals for the first time. After nearly a decade of building, Smith’s vision was in sight.
When Smith took over as coach in 1975, St. Thomas Aquinas was coming off a .500 season and short on players. Eight years later, the program had about 200 players across five teams and five district titles in his tenure. He was sending more players to Division I programs than anyone else in South Florida — so many he installed a long-distance telephone in his home to keep in touch with the former Raiders strewn across the country.
By the 1980s, money was pouring into the athletic program and the school built a new $250,000 weight room in 1981. Smith credits, as much as anyone, former athletic director Bo Litzinger, and former principals Monsignor Vincent Kelly and Sister John Norton for their commitment to building the athletic program from its humble beginnings.
College recruiting was always the bedrock. All those trophies are nice. Seeing players go to college was even better.
In his first season as coach, Smith put together a media guide with photos of every kid on the team and he sent them about 700 colleges. About 450 responded. Those became his mailing list. It didn’t matter if they were Division I or Division II schools, junior colleges or National Association of Intercollegiate Athletic programs.
On National Signing Day, players from Dillard, Boyd Anderson, South Broward and all over the county would come to St. Thomas Aquinas to sign their national letters of intent. No one had a Rolodex of college coaching contacts like Smith, and he still talks to some of those players he helped get into college.
“This is what our job, in my mind, was,” Smith said. “Educate and help.”
Now it can look easy for the Raiders. In the last three years, 39 players have signed with Football Bowl Subdivision programs. This year alone, St. Thomas Aquinas won four team state championships and eight player-of-the-year awards from the Miami Herald.
“It’s like when you push a ball up a hill. It took Coach, what, 20-plus years, 30 years to get the ball to the top of the hill?” Russell said. “If you look at how long it took him to win the first title, that ball has been rolling on the other side of the hill for a long time.”
‘That ball has been rolling’
Smith’s only losing football season happened in 1989. Two years later, the Raiders went to the state championship for the first time, losing to Danny Wuerffel and Fort Walton Beach.
St. Thomas Aquinas hasn’t missed a postseason since. The 1991 team, in a lot of ways, was — and still is — the backbone of the program.
Russell was a senior. He’s the new athletic director.
Roger Harriott was a freshman running back. He’s now the coach and has won four state titles in six years.
“He shared the plans and process for success,” Harriott said in a text message. “His greatest achievement is the help and support he provided to coaches and athletes around the country.”
Said Porter: “I took on his model: Coach you hard and love you off the field.”
Smith won six state titles before retiring from coaching in 2011 and then he oversaw six more as athletic director, and the Raiders set the FHSAA record with their 12th state title last year. St. Thomas Aquinas has sent 40 players to the NFL since Smith got to Florida and no school has more current NFL players.
The ball is certainly rolling, and there’s no sign of it stopping any time soon.
Smith will still be around the program after he officially retires this month. He will be a consultant for Russell while the new AD gets settled in and, inevitably, he will stay around the program beyond then.
Russell is one of his former players, after all, and Smith can’t help but keep teaching them.
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 11:36 AM.
