Here is STL Post Dispatch article on Coach Smith
written by Dave Matter on 3/3/15
COLUMBIA, Mo. • University of Missouri wrestling coach Brian Smith has a problem. His throat is sore from countless interviews he has conducted, but he has more phone calls to make. Smith’s Tigers, the best team on Missouri’s campus, just won a milestone event. For that, the Tigers now are ranked No. 1 in the country.
Smith should be watching film of upcoming opponents, but on this busy weekday afternoon two things top his list.
Chicken wings and wine.
For Smith, in his 17th season as Mizzou’s wrestling coach, the job requires non-stop grassroots fundraising to maintain the program’s facilities and sustain its future.
While the Tigers prepare to host this weekend’s Mid-American Conference tournament, Smith scrambles to plan Friday’s fundraiser at Deja Vu Comedy Club, where donors will pay $75 a ticket to benefit the wrestling program. His phone beeps with texts and emails. Each one, Smith hopes, is final confirmation on donations to secure the wings and wine.
“Every day I feel like I have to raise money,” Smith said. “But it’s part of being a wrestling coach.
“When I first got here, I had to fool people that we had a budget. … It’s just hustling.”
Smith, 49, has hustled Missouri into college wrestling’s penthouse suite. Division I college wrestling has crowned only 11 schools as national champion since 1928 — and the last 26 titles have been won by Penn State, Iowa, Minnesota or Oklahoma State — but Smith doesn’t apologize for outsized expectations for the NCAA Wrestling Championships, set for March 19-21 in St. Louis.
Missouri (24-0) enters the MAC tournament as the nation’s only undefeated team in dual matches, highlighted by last month’s 18-12 win over then-No. 1 Iowa at the National Duals in Iowa City, Iowa.
Wrestling doesn’t draw the biggest crowds at Mizzou or haul in the most cash — in the 2014 fiscal year, MU wrestling revenue was $220,210, compared to $1.17 million in expenses — but Smith has built the school’s biggest winner at the national level. In two weeks, he could deliver the school its first national team championship since the men's track team won in 1965.
“Brian has really done things the right way,” said MU senior associate athletics director Sarah Reesman, who oversees the wrestling program. “He built a program from the ground up. He didn’t cut any corners. He laid the foundation for what we know as ‘Tiger Style,’ and it’s grown into something that’s more than a wrestling team. It’s a philosophy.”
“You’ve got to expect to win,” Smith said, “but you can’t be overconfident. You can’t say, ‘I’m going to walk on the mat, I’m wearing a Missouri singlet so I’m going to win.’”
In the Missouri wrestling room, sacrifice breeds confidence, and no one knows sacrifice like the Tigers’ coach.
In 1980, Smith’s parents, Brian and Linda Smith, packed up their family and moved from Binghamton, N.Y., to Orlando, Fla. The move came on doctor’s orders.
“I was a sickly kid,” Smith said.
The coach suffered from asthma throughout childhood. He had pneumonia seven times. He was hospitalized for a month in first grade. When Smith turned 14, the family doctor gave the Smiths two options: major lung surgery or move to a warmer climate.
“Binghamton was the coldest place in the world,” Brian Smith, the elder, said in a phone interview. “So we moved to Florida.”
Smith, 35 years later, still is awed by his family’s decision.
“We moved for me,” Smith said. “They made a huge sacrifice.”
Smith’s father had just taken a sales job in New York, but in Florida he’d return to his earlier career as a high school teacher and football coach. Little Brian, as the son was known, would repeat eighth grade when the family moved south and play his favorite sports: He was a point guard in basketball and option quarterback in football.
After Smith’s ninth grade football season, Dad made a suggestion during a car ride that forever changed Smith’s life. He suggested Brian try wrestling. Smith had wrestled some as a fifth grader and hated it.
“He was small,” Smith’s dad said, “and it was a good sport for him.”
Dad was right. Smith soon fell in love with wrestling and quit football.
“It became my life,” Smith said.
He qualified for the Florida state meet as a sophomore and won the championship as a junior. Spring breaks and summer vacations were spent back in New York wrestling with his cousins.
For Smith’s senior year, it was time for another family sacrifice. Randy Miller coached the state’s best high school program at St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale, nearly four hours away. The Irish Catholic son moved south to live with his Jewish grandmother, Lillian Bluver, and wrestle for Miller. Smith still cherishes the experience.
“I had such a great upbringing,” Smith said. “One side, my dad’s side, was all into sports. The Jewish side was very much into education.”
After winning another state title as a senior, Smith went to Michigan State, where Miller wrestled in college. Smith, wrestling at 126 pounds, earned All-Big Ten honors three times. He also settled on his future.
“My dad is why I’m in coaching,” he said. “It’s all I ever wanted to be, like my dad.”
After two years coaching high school wrestling and football in Florida, Smith went north again and became an assistant wrestling coach at Cornell. He landed his first head coaching job in 1997, at Syracuse. At the time, several schools were shutting down wrestling programs. Smith had to raise $2 million to keep Syracuse’s problem alive. He raised $300,000 but after a year looked for other opportunities.
Smith interviewed for 10 different jobs before Missouri took a chance on the 32-year-old, in May 1998.
“He was an outsider and not a well known name,” said Montana State AD Peter Fields, who worked at Mizzou at the time and headed the selection committee that chose Smith. “I talked to a lot of people in the wrestling world, and they talked about Brian as up-and-coming coach that was really going to do a good job.”
In the five-team Big 12, Mizzou finished fifth at the conference meet in six of Smith’s first eight years. Within the program, though, the foundation was taking shape. When the basketball team moved to Mizzou Arena in 2004, Smith’s wrestlers took over the fourth floor of the Hearnes Center, converting the old basketball practice gym into a wrestling room. Piece by piece, Smith built a weight room that’s exclusively for wrestlers. In 2011, Smith built the 3,500-square foot Olympic Training Center, where he hires former wrestlers to stay on campus and work with current wrestlers — a luxury for recruiting and training but a costly expense that requires significant funding.
On the mats, the breakthrough came in 2006, when 174-pounder Ben Askren won MU’s first of five NCAA titles under Smith. In 2007, the Tigers finished third at the NCAA meet. In 2012, Mizzou won the Big 12 title. Smith has produced 20 All-Americans, including current 197-pound star J’Den Cox, who last year became MU’s first freshman national champion.
Along the way, a brand was born. In the early 2000s, Mizzou wrestler Jeremy Spates would shout “Tiger Style” when the team broke down its huddle at practice and meets, a custom he took from his high school team in Oklahoma, the Norman Tigers.
“Tiger Style” stuck with Smith, who had begun to keep a journal of all of his thoughts and philosophies on the sport and coaching. Smith wanted Mizzou wrestling to mean more than takedowns and pinfalls.
Over time, Smith devised a pyramid that came to define his program. The base foundation is one word: Believe.
“It’s a commitment to a lifestyle that we expect,” he said. “The guys have completely bought into it.”
This post was edited on 3/5 8:38 PM by mlbruem
This post was edited on 3/5 8:42 PM by mlbruem
written by Dave Matter on 3/3/15
COLUMBIA, Mo. • University of Missouri wrestling coach Brian Smith has a problem. His throat is sore from countless interviews he has conducted, but he has more phone calls to make. Smith’s Tigers, the best team on Missouri’s campus, just won a milestone event. For that, the Tigers now are ranked No. 1 in the country.
Smith should be watching film of upcoming opponents, but on this busy weekday afternoon two things top his list.
Chicken wings and wine.
For Smith, in his 17th season as Mizzou’s wrestling coach, the job requires non-stop grassroots fundraising to maintain the program’s facilities and sustain its future.
While the Tigers prepare to host this weekend’s Mid-American Conference tournament, Smith scrambles to plan Friday’s fundraiser at Deja Vu Comedy Club, where donors will pay $75 a ticket to benefit the wrestling program. His phone beeps with texts and emails. Each one, Smith hopes, is final confirmation on donations to secure the wings and wine.
“Every day I feel like I have to raise money,” Smith said. “But it’s part of being a wrestling coach.
“When I first got here, I had to fool people that we had a budget. … It’s just hustling.”
Smith, 49, has hustled Missouri into college wrestling’s penthouse suite. Division I college wrestling has crowned only 11 schools as national champion since 1928 — and the last 26 titles have been won by Penn State, Iowa, Minnesota or Oklahoma State — but Smith doesn’t apologize for outsized expectations for the NCAA Wrestling Championships, set for March 19-21 in St. Louis.
Missouri (24-0) enters the MAC tournament as the nation’s only undefeated team in dual matches, highlighted by last month’s 18-12 win over then-No. 1 Iowa at the National Duals in Iowa City, Iowa.
Wrestling doesn’t draw the biggest crowds at Mizzou or haul in the most cash — in the 2014 fiscal year, MU wrestling revenue was $220,210, compared to $1.17 million in expenses — but Smith has built the school’s biggest winner at the national level. In two weeks, he could deliver the school its first national team championship since the men's track team won in 1965.
“Brian has really done things the right way,” said MU senior associate athletics director Sarah Reesman, who oversees the wrestling program. “He built a program from the ground up. He didn’t cut any corners. He laid the foundation for what we know as ‘Tiger Style,’ and it’s grown into something that’s more than a wrestling team. It’s a philosophy.”
“You’ve got to expect to win,” Smith said, “but you can’t be overconfident. You can’t say, ‘I’m going to walk on the mat, I’m wearing a Missouri singlet so I’m going to win.’”
In the Missouri wrestling room, sacrifice breeds confidence, and no one knows sacrifice like the Tigers’ coach.
In 1980, Smith’s parents, Brian and Linda Smith, packed up their family and moved from Binghamton, N.Y., to Orlando, Fla. The move came on doctor’s orders.
“I was a sickly kid,” Smith said.
The coach suffered from asthma throughout childhood. He had pneumonia seven times. He was hospitalized for a month in first grade. When Smith turned 14, the family doctor gave the Smiths two options: major lung surgery or move to a warmer climate.
“Binghamton was the coldest place in the world,” Brian Smith, the elder, said in a phone interview. “So we moved to Florida.”
Smith, 35 years later, still is awed by his family’s decision.
“We moved for me,” Smith said. “They made a huge sacrifice.”
Smith’s father had just taken a sales job in New York, but in Florida he’d return to his earlier career as a high school teacher and football coach. Little Brian, as the son was known, would repeat eighth grade when the family moved south and play his favorite sports: He was a point guard in basketball and option quarterback in football.
After Smith’s ninth grade football season, Dad made a suggestion during a car ride that forever changed Smith’s life. He suggested Brian try wrestling. Smith had wrestled some as a fifth grader and hated it.
“He was small,” Smith’s dad said, “and it was a good sport for him.”
Dad was right. Smith soon fell in love with wrestling and quit football.
“It became my life,” Smith said.
He qualified for the Florida state meet as a sophomore and won the championship as a junior. Spring breaks and summer vacations were spent back in New York wrestling with his cousins.
For Smith’s senior year, it was time for another family sacrifice. Randy Miller coached the state’s best high school program at St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale, nearly four hours away. The Irish Catholic son moved south to live with his Jewish grandmother, Lillian Bluver, and wrestle for Miller. Smith still cherishes the experience.
“I had such a great upbringing,” Smith said. “One side, my dad’s side, was all into sports. The Jewish side was very much into education.”
After winning another state title as a senior, Smith went to Michigan State, where Miller wrestled in college. Smith, wrestling at 126 pounds, earned All-Big Ten honors three times. He also settled on his future.
“My dad is why I’m in coaching,” he said. “It’s all I ever wanted to be, like my dad.”
After two years coaching high school wrestling and football in Florida, Smith went north again and became an assistant wrestling coach at Cornell. He landed his first head coaching job in 1997, at Syracuse. At the time, several schools were shutting down wrestling programs. Smith had to raise $2 million to keep Syracuse’s problem alive. He raised $300,000 but after a year looked for other opportunities.
Smith interviewed for 10 different jobs before Missouri took a chance on the 32-year-old, in May 1998.
“He was an outsider and not a well known name,” said Montana State AD Peter Fields, who worked at Mizzou at the time and headed the selection committee that chose Smith. “I talked to a lot of people in the wrestling world, and they talked about Brian as up-and-coming coach that was really going to do a good job.”
In the five-team Big 12, Mizzou finished fifth at the conference meet in six of Smith’s first eight years. Within the program, though, the foundation was taking shape. When the basketball team moved to Mizzou Arena in 2004, Smith’s wrestlers took over the fourth floor of the Hearnes Center, converting the old basketball practice gym into a wrestling room. Piece by piece, Smith built a weight room that’s exclusively for wrestlers. In 2011, Smith built the 3,500-square foot Olympic Training Center, where he hires former wrestlers to stay on campus and work with current wrestlers — a luxury for recruiting and training but a costly expense that requires significant funding.
On the mats, the breakthrough came in 2006, when 174-pounder Ben Askren won MU’s first of five NCAA titles under Smith. In 2007, the Tigers finished third at the NCAA meet. In 2012, Mizzou won the Big 12 title. Smith has produced 20 All-Americans, including current 197-pound star J’Den Cox, who last year became MU’s first freshman national champion.
Along the way, a brand was born. In the early 2000s, Mizzou wrestler Jeremy Spates would shout “Tiger Style” when the team broke down its huddle at practice and meets, a custom he took from his high school team in Oklahoma, the Norman Tigers.
“Tiger Style” stuck with Smith, who had begun to keep a journal of all of his thoughts and philosophies on the sport and coaching. Smith wanted Mizzou wrestling to mean more than takedowns and pinfalls.
Over time, Smith devised a pyramid that came to define his program. The base foundation is one word: Believe.
“It’s a commitment to a lifestyle that we expect,” he said. “The guys have completely bought into it.”
This post was edited on 3/5 8:38 PM by mlbruem
This post was edited on 3/5 8:42 PM by mlbruem
