Don Shula inspired a generation of South Florida coaches. His legacy will last longer
Roland Smith thought he was the luckiest man in the world on the second day of the 1991 NFL Draft. He had just won two national championships playing for Jimmy Johnson and Dennis Erickson with the Miami Hurricanes, and now Don Shula was calling him to say the Miami Dolphins were taking him in the eighth round.
Smith, who played at Miami Northwestern Senior High School, had dreamed of following this exact trajectory — getting to play for Johnson and then Shula. Could a future coach have possibly asked for any better situation?
“If I had to write a book, I couldn’t write it no sweeter than that,” said Smith, who now coaches at Miami Central High School and won his fifth state championship last year. “I just felt like I was blessed as a player to play for two of the best at what they do. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Smith only spent one preseason with the Dolphins before an ankle injury prematurely cut short his career, but the up-close, in-person look he got at a legend at work still influences him today as he has become one of the most accomplished coaches in Florida history. Smith’s entire coaching persona, he said, combines what he learned from Johnson and Shula, particularly Shula’s perpetually unworried demeanor.
Smith, of course, isn’t alone in drawing inspiration from the Pro Football Hall of Famer, who died Monday at 90. The Hurricanes only became a powerhouse when Howard Schnellenberger left his post as Shula’s offensive coordinator with the Dolphins to become the coach in Coral Gables. The football boom in South Florida, which now produces more NFL talent than anywhere else, can largely be traced to Shula’s arrival in Miami. Shula influenced the coaches who are still influencing a football-crazed community.
“What the Dolphins did in ‘72 and ‘73 was a national news story,” said Fort Lauderdale St. Thomas Aquinas High School athletic director George Smith, who won six state championships as a coach. “It pushed Miami from a beach town and millionaires to a rugged football town because that’s how he coached.”
Smith arrived in Florida in 1972, first as an assistant coach for St. Thomas Aquinas before he took over as coach in 1975. His first interactions with Shula came as the opposition — Mike Shula and Dave Shula, the coach’s two sons, played at Hollywood Chaminade-Madonna College Preparatory School. One night, Smith went out to Hollywood McArthur High School to scout a game between McArthur and Chaminade-Madonna, and he locked eyes with Shula in the bleachers. Shula beckoned Smith over and told the young coach he was impressed with the job he was doing.
About 20 years later, Shula’s grandchildren went to play for Smith with the Raiders. First Dan Shula was a quarterback, and then Chris Shula and Matt Shula were stars on defense. In 2001, some members of Smith’s staff started up St. Thomas Aquinas’ football website and Shula became the world’s most overqualified spotter, sitting in the press box to help keep stats for his grandson’s team.
When he was named the USA Today High School Football Coach of the Year in 2008, Smith cited Shula as one of the coaches whom he most admired along with College Football Hall of Famers Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler. A few years later, the NFL started naming a high school coach of the year: the Don Shula NFL High School Coach of the Year Award.
“If you go back on those guys’ histories,” said Smith, who was the Dolphins’ first ever nominee for the Shula Award in 2011, “they were caring, they took care of their players and they loved their players, and that’s what I wanted to be.”
Manny Diaz felt the same way. The Hurricanes coach was born in Miami in 1974, exactly two months after the Dolphins won their second straight Super Bowl. For the first 21 years of Diaz’s life, Shula was the only NFL coach he ever knew.
For Diaz, Saturdays were dominated by the Hurricanes and Sundays were dominated by the Dolphins. Mondays often were, too — it was the night to watch “The Don Shula Show” on WPLG and get a glimpse inside the mind of the winningest coach in NFL history.
“’The Don Shula Show’ on Monday nights was required viewing,” Diaz told the Miami Herald. “He had a great deal of inspiration of not just wanting to be a coach, but what does that mean to be a coach? And to handle himself the way that he did and always had a tough edge about him, but at the same time there was always a great level of classic and dignity in the way he went about handling himself.”
Former Hurricanes coach Mark Richt’s path to coaching was similar to Roland Smith’s. He played at Boca Raton High School and then for the Hurricanes in the 1980s. Like Smith, he briefly got a chance in the NFL before being cut by Shula’s Dolphins.
“I knew my time as a player was over,” Richt said in a statement to the Herald. “To see a man of Coach Shula’s integrity have so much success attracted me to becoming a coach. Working with him and his son Dave convinced me that is what I wanted to do with my career.”
Joe Zaccheo lived through the whole Shula-inspired football explosion in the 1970s. He played football at Central in the 1960s, when certain high school games were massive draws in the community, but the Dolphins and Hurricanes were basically irrelevant. He then spent 40 years as coach and athletic director at Miami Gardens Monsignor Edward Pace High School, winning a state title in 2003, before retiring last year.
Everyone started caring about football because of Shula and every coach wanted to be a miniature Shula. Generations of players are Shula acolytes, even if they never watched him coach a game.
“Let’s face it,” Zaccheo said. “He brought notoriety to this town in a big way.”
This story was originally published May 4, 2020 at 5:33 PM.
