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Q&A: Mark Smith talks about first months as Central Athletic Coordinator, football coach

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6 months ago

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Q&A: Mark Smith talks about first months as Central Athletic Coordinator, football coach

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San Angelo Independent School District hired Mark Smith as the new athletic coordinator and head football coach of Central High School on Feb. 2.

Before taking the position at Central, Smith spent one year as a defensive analyst for the University of Oklahoma football program, he was the defensive coordinator at Long Island University during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic shortened year and was an assistant at Colorado University, the University of Arkansas and Southern Methodist University.

Prior to his decade of experience in the college ranks, Smith was a coach at Hurst L.D. Bell High School and was the head coach for four years from 2009-14 earning a playoff bid in three straight seasons. He was also an assistant at Irving MacArthur and Colleyville Heritage.

Smith is an Abilene native who graduated from Abilene Cooper before attending Hardin-Simmons University. He lettered three years for the Cowboys in football, earning first-team All-American honors as a senior and being named first-team All-American Southwest Conference three times.

Smith sat down with the Standard-Times to talk about his first few months as Central’s athletic coordinator and football coach.

When you saw the job at Central open, what were your thoughts?

I had really planned on taking last year off and I was gonna try to recharge my batteries. A decade in major college football takes a toll mentally and physically, and when you’re on the treadmill and it’s going full speed you don’t really notice it, but when you step off of it for a minute, you’re able to step back and say ‘Wow, I need some time here.’ We were fired from Colorado at the end of the 2022 season and I still had a year left on my contract so that’s why I was just going to take that year and just try to regroup and figure out if I wanted to dive back into the deep end of the pool. So, my daughter ended up going to the University of Oklahoma and it was a place I had coached before, so Brent Venables reached out right away even though he did not know my daughter was gonna go to school there… He said that he wanted me to come work at Oklahoma and so with our daughter going to school there, it turned out to be perfect… Analyst jobs have a short shelf life. They’re really not meant to be long-term and are for coaches in a transition period and we knew it would be a one-year commitment, so we were faced with ‘What would we do next?’

My wife and I prayed about it, we were diligent in that process and where do we feel led to be? Was it college football? Was it in high school football? And where was that at? I think that time allowed me to consider all the factors, and we had options to stay in college football. In fact, I had a job offer once I’d already accepted this job back in major college football, but it was appealing to me to be back in the high school game. I have a son who will be a sophomore next year and to coach my son, who, for the last decade, I missed really everything he did. My heart was really tugged in this direction, and so once we got to the end of the season we said, ‘Okay, we’re going to look at some jobs,” and see if there is the right thing that fits what we want. So we looked into several jobs and we had several options, but this job kept coming back to me. Since I was from Abilene, I understand the area and have an appreciation for the history and tradition of winning football here in San Angelo. That’s why this place was becoming appealing to me.

Before my interview, I asked coach Chant to take me around the area because I wanted to get a feel for the environment… Most of the time you trust your gut and how you feel, so I wanted that experience. Coach Chant politely accepted and took me to the school and it sat well with me doing that and I just knew going into the interview that this place had everything I was looking for. I think that my skill set complements what is needed here. So, during the interview process, I knew that it went well and I just felt it… I knew this was going to escalate to a job interview and then as I knew we were close, I began doing more research to find out more things about the team and the community. Other things that factored in for me, were the superintendent, the principal, the location, and then just everything fell into place. The timing also factored in, I’m a big believer in the right person at the right place at the right time… And so whenever you find that magical space where you have the right person for the right place at the right time, that’s when you see success.

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In your initial interview, you said that you wanted to get back to coaching. Was that a major draw for you to come to Central?

At my core, I love being on the grass with a whistle around my neck with a group of guys instructing, educating, teaching and motivating. College football really helped me in a lot of ways, you have to be so sharp in every area because so much of your time is in recruiting and also retaining your players from year to year. And so you spend an incredible amount of time doing that in a very high-stakes game this is college football recruiting, you have to be on that at all times and that requires a great deal of your attention. The travel aspect goes in with that as well. You’re flying coast-to-coast maybe the night before a game. You’re gone a lot in the spring and winter, so you don’t have much time with your players… In high school football that process is trimmed down a great deal. You’re instructing, educating and coaching without all of the all of the other factors that are included in college football. At my core that’s what I love doing, that’s where I am most comfortable. I loved every aspect of college football, but if you said I could only choose one or the other, give me a whistle, a patch of grass and a group of guys.

You have attended a lot of school events since you were hired, why is that important?

I like to be visible, I think that’s important. I want to be supportive of what we’re doing in all of our programs, that’s a genuine thing for me. Whether it’s a track meet, a basketball game, a softball or a baseball game — I was at the gymnastics state meet in El Paso. I love that, and I think as the athletic coordinator here, it’s important for me to be visible to other programs so that they see there’s real genuine support from the campus level to the athletic administration level. I enjoy congratulating our athletes when they do things really well.

We have a lot of things to build on at this school and I think the visibility within my position is important for those reasons and that’s something that I love doing and will continue to do.

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What are your short-term goals for the program?

My vision is clear on where we’re going and when you take over a new program. It takes some time to identify exactly where you’re at, the issue and the stressors challenging this program, and how you can remove those obstacles so that you can be at your best and keep a steady foot on the gas pedal moving forward.

Then you move that needle from where it is now to where you want to go. The first time I was a head coach I tried to move that needle in the first week and it doesn’t work that way — you end up taking two steps forward and one step back.

So, here I took my time to initially identify what we want and how to get there. I know where we want to be — we want to be a state contender and I want to consistently be the best team in our division. I want to be the best team in West Texas and then take that to the entire state. Well, how fast can you get there? That part takes a little bit of time to come in and identify. We have good players here. This was not a broken situation by any means, and the work ethic of the players is tremendous, you can ask them to do anything and they will do it — another appealing part about a West Texas football player. They show up early and they stay late, they come when you ask and we get after it and get it done, so that was an amazing piece to see.

We’ve gone through some process here of emphasizing the mental conditioning within this team so our mental capacity to function at a high level over an extended period of time in a chaotic environment needs to be on a championship level… The analogy that I use with our players is right now we’re preparing the soil. You know, my grandfather was a farmer and a rancher. You prepare the soil. It’s the first thing you do, you get all of the rocks and weeds and everything out of it, so we have nice, clean, fertile soil ready for the seeds to be planted — that’s our summer program. That’s where we plant the seeds and then we nurture that and then in the fall, we reap the harvest for what we’ve done.

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