Meet the Staff: D.J. Smith

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In a series of stories over the next few weeks, PowerMizzou is going in-depth with Missouri's assistant coaches to give Tiger fans a better idea of who the coaches are and what led them to this point. You can find our most recent Q&A with defensive line coach Brick Haley right here. Today, we talk with linebackers coach D.J. Smith.

DS: "For me, it started back, I was four or five years old. My dad kind of exposed me pretty early. I started playing Pee Wee ball around the age of five here in the city of Charlotte. I think playing at Briarwood High School, East Charlotte. We were the Plaza Rams. Five years old, playing for the Plaza Rams."

DS: "Five year old football, a lot of oversized equipment. Big helmets, big mouthpieces. It pretty much was like a soccer match. Everybody just followed the guy with the ball. Chase the ball, try to tackle him. It's not as advanced as it is now with the trick plays and the passing. I've seen some five-year old football with guys in shotgun. We were old school I-formation, sweep right, sweep left, fullback dive and quarterback sweeps. That was pretty much it."

DS: "I think I took to it right away. As far as I know, I've had a ball in my hands since I was four. Every year of my life I've either coached or played football since I was five years old. It's kind of my life and kind of raised me and it's kind of who I am."

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DS: "Yeah, he's from Charlotte. He played for North Mecklenburg High School down here and then he went off to play at Catawba. Didn't finish school and I think he had me and started working. He was into the flag football, it looked to me sometimes like tackle football with flags. Those were the Saturdays, I loaded up and played, I would have my game then he would have his games later in the afternoon. That's kind of what it was."

DS: "I played sports year round. What's crazy, I was talking with a buddy of mine the other day. I was like, with quarantine, this is the first time my dad hasn't coached baseball, football's probably going to start a little bit later, probably since I was four. To answer your question, I played football, basketball, baseball. I was a year round kid."

DS: "I was against it to be honest. I never wanted to coach. The crazy thing is I remember watching film. My dad had me watching tape from my games back, I was probably like 11, 12, 13 years old, watching film. I was cutting grass, mowing the hill before games. I don't know if I was doing leg drive or just doing chores. Maybe a little bit of both. But I was watching tape at an early age. I just learned from him, being around a lot of football and watching it kind of got my football IQ up. Understanding certain schemes and how everything fits and learning to be that guy going into middle school. We didn't lose a game in middle school. I was a two-way player there. Always being that, always playing both sides of the ball, you got to know offensive plays and defensive plays so, you know, my recall was always pretty good. But I think he gave me my first coaching job which was middle school girls' basketball back in 2014 when I got done playing football in the NFL. I remember I got released by the Cleveland Browns. I think that next week I was like, 'I don't have much to do' and he was like, 'Come on out and coach.' I was like, 'I don't want to coach.' I was volunteering and then naturally just, let's work here, let's do this. I started out, I was the conditioning coach, whatever that means in middle school girls' basketball with 13 and 14 year olds. I was the conditioning coach, I was on the bench working defense, drawing up some plays, helping with substitutions. We went undefeated that year which was pretty cool and then I end up coaching the boys as well. That was my first coaching job ever.

I got introduced, I think he was the quarterbacks coach of my high school team, coach Aaron Brand, he gave me my first opportunity to coach football on the high school level for Vance High School back in 2015 so that's when I first started coaching football."

DS: "Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Got to be a little more soft spoken. You don't want to push too hard. You push them, but the approach is different. You still coach them hard, but it's just the approach. With the boys, I'm like, 'Hey, this is what we're doing.' You've kind of got to put your thumb a little bit harder because believe it or not they're a little bit more like, 'Ah, I'm kind of tired.' No, we're going to go a little bit harder, we're going to do this today. For the most part they were all good kids so we didn't really have any problems."

DS: "You know, the crazy thing about it, people ask me that a lot. I never really thought about it to be honest. For me, playing at App State changed my whole life, changed my family's life. I just wanted to play football to graduate. That was my biggest thing was graduating, my mom and my dad being at my graduation because I was the first one other than my uncle, so I was the second one in my family to ever graduate from college. Now I've got two sisters and a younger brother that are going to graduate from college here in the next couple years. For me it was just trying to change the generation a little bit, change my family's life, and playing football with my guys. We all came up together, a lot of blood, sweat and tears. For me, I never really thought about that. I was just playing football."

DS: "I was into business. I was in business management, minor in accounting so I was going to go in the business world and I guess be a businessman. Work in accounting or manage a firm, wherever that kind of led me, but definitely going to be the business route."

DS: "I think once I went into my senior year and my last game we played against Florida. I think I had double digit tackles that game. I think I had 15, 16 tackles that game, but one particular play stood out to me the most. I don't know if you remember the name, a guy named Chris Rainey that was fast as night. I remember natural backer instincts, it was SEC versus 1AA, we were really outmatched. He breaks through, breaks free, I remember chasing him down. It was 40 yards downfield, I remember catching him and chasing him down, I was like, 'Man, I'm pretty fast.' Then the strength coach at the time, Mike Kent, great, great, guy, he came to me after that game and he's like 'That's an NFL play.' I'm like, 'You think so?' I'm 20, 21 years old, I was a pretty humble guy, I didn't really think too much of myself, I'm like, 'Maybe you're right.' Then I was watching it on film when the season was over with, somebody had made highlights of me in my four years there, I'm like, 'I'm pretty good.' So from then, I got the agents and stuff like that, I got a combine invite. I was like, 'I got a shot at this thing.' From there I went and trained in Florida with all the other athletes, I went and trained in Naples, Florida...At that point, it didn't really hit me yet and I guess it didn't really hit me until the draft honestly. I got drafted by Green Bay in the sixth round, I was like, 'Man, this is surreal.' Never would have thought, definitely wouldn't have thought the Packers, but to be a drafted guy. Looking back at it now, I was just thinking, I wasn't naive, but I was like, 'There are a lot of great football players and I was the 186th pick out of that class. I was the top 200 players in the word coming out of college.' For me, I thought it was pretty cool. So it was at that point where the light kind of went on and I was like, 'Hey, we can make a run at this thing' and let's see what we can do."

DS: "Most definitely. More people are retired than retire if that makes sense."

DS: "initially you're thinking, you're engulfed in it, you get caught up in the workouts, your body, mentally, like me, every year, I knew around June, July, August was all ball then we're into the season. Off-season is February, March, a little bit of April then May we're kind of revving back up again. So for that first offseason where I was out of it, I guess it would be the 2015 spring, I was middle school girls coach, that kind of extended me, I was still in that competitive environment, so I still had a little bit of my edge. January came and I didn't get picked up so I was like, 'We got to transition this thing.' Luckily for me, I was lucky to have a really good support system. My mom, my dad, they really understood what I was going through and they kind of eased me into the transition and helped me out from that standpoint. Just kind of lifted me up and keeping me up. Initially, I went off, I interviewed for some business jobs because that was my original plan. I was like, 'I don't want to work in business.' The crazy thing was, I think it got to maybe around summer time, maybe around May or June and high school practices were starting their summer stuff. I had an interview to be a businessman and make around $50,000 or I could be a high school football coach, be a teacher, make around $35,000 and make a $2,000 football stipend and go that route. I was like, 'I'm going to try this coaching thing out. I don't really want to be a businessman. That's not what I am.' So I tried it out and the rest is history."

DS: "I was in between situations. Because after that first year at Vance I was blessed enough to be able to interview for the head coaching job at my alma mater, Independence High School. So I didn't get the job there. I was a finalist and I think it was a difference of just not having enough experience and being 26 or 27. I guess they wanted a more experienced guy. I'm glad they did because I'm glad the way it worked out. I was going to go to A.L. Brown and a coach who coached against me when I was in high school at Butler High School when I was at Independence in Charlotte. I went to him, I was going to be his cornerbacks coach. Then coach Woody, coach Nate Woody who was the defensive coordinator at the time at App State in 2016, he had reached out to me about coming back and maybe being a grad assistant. I turned him down three times. I was like, 'I don't want to go back to college, I don't want anything to do with school, I don't want to do that.' He called me back the third time was like, 'Hey, we got a quality control role for you. It comes with benefits. It doesn't pay a whole lot, but it's a way to coach college football at App State.' I was like, 'Let me think about it' and I talked to (the high school coach) and he was like, 'You need to take that job. If you really want to do coaching, this is your best opportunity now while you're young, get into college coaching, see if it's for you because high school isn't going anywhere.' So I went and checked it out and at the time I'd just had a son so I was talking with my child's mother and I was like, 'What do you think?' She was like, 'You need to go do it.' I talked to my dad, my dad was like, 'You need to go do it.' I was like okay. So I go do it. Jumped in, full head of steam. I remember the first day going up there, I think had some type of individual workout. My first day up there, we're going into it, it's full offseason conditioning. It was like, man, I was almost like, 'This is crazy, it's almost like I never left four years prior to that.' So that's kind of how everything started.

Had a relationship with coach Satterfield. He was the offensive coordinator, I believe, my freshman and sophomore year. I think that's when he left and went to Toledo."

DS: "Yes sir. Eighteen years old."

DS: "You know, obviously kids are different, but for me it was kind of just like the passion was still there, the grit, the blue collar work ethic, all that stuff was the same. Even though it was Division One, to me, there were a couple more bells and whistles with uniforms, but other than that the pride of the school was still there."

DS: "Absolutely. That was the running joke that I had with a lot of them. I was like, 'the stuff that y'all have, that's because of what we did.' Just to kind of jab at them and keep them humble a little bit, kind of bring them back down. But they were really good kids. Like I told them, I said, 'I was a guy who was here for four years, this is what we did, this is why you guys have what you have now. You guys have the opportunity to take what you're doing for four years so in four years, when they have all the stuff and the program's in better hands than when you left it, you can come back and give the same speech.' Kind of used that as a little motivation and a couple of nuggets to keep guys motivated."

DS: "For me, I was blessed enough to meet coach Drink and there was an opportunity to stay and keep building on what we did. We had a great team coming back, good offense, good defense, good special teams. It wasn't far from Charlotte. It was about an hour, 45 minute drive for me to get home. I kind of was grounded there. All my roots were still in North Carolina. For me, it worked out pretty good. Coach Drinkwitz is an amazing guy. He's a great man. I thank him for giving me the opportunity to stay for the 2019 season because we did some great things last year."

DS: "You know, it's always hard. For me, that's where I cut my teeth. That's where I kind of grew up as a man, kind of matured, was able to come back and coach and accelerate the program. To be able to say as a player I accelerated the program and as a coach I accelerated the program, not a lot of people can say they had that opportunity. For me, it was time to kind of venture out a little bit, kind of spread my wings, get some experience and see some other things."

DS: "I think it's challenging. As coaches, we're problem solvers at the end of the day. We find solutions. So with the quarantine you come up with different ideas, brainstorm and make a collective group effort of how do you get better as a team, how do we get better as a position group, how do we get better as a defense, how do we get better as coaches? It's always evolving. How do we get better at the next thing? How do we get better today than we were yesterday?"

DS: "You know, we actually started him out, me and his mom started him out playing flag. What's surreal for me is my son, his first coach was my dad. Playing flag football at four. Wasn't really into it. Kind of was looking around. Then the next year, a little better. Started running around, started grabbing flags. He was a little more into it. This past year, going into this year, we're going to put him in and see if the light comes on. For me, I've got the player aspect, high school player, college player, NFL player, then I've got the coach inside of me where it's just like I know what it feels like for parents to coach their kids while they already have a coach. So I don't want to get him too early. I kind of just want to let him get in and kind of see if you like it, this is what you've got to do to get better. If you don't like it, let's find something else that you're interested in. But right now, he's into it, he seems to enjoy it, he says he wants to be a coach. That's always a funny conversation. He's running around the house with a whistle on so that's always fun. I'm just kind of taking it season by season. Let his body mature, let him kind of figure it out for himself. When the time is right, he'll be ready and I'll be there waiting for him."

DS: "The first year it was because that was the first year. The next year you kind of see some flashes. He's pretty quick. It's kind of like, 'is it time yet?" I don't want to press it too soon. So it's like to I jump up now or do I let him mature a little bit? Knowing me, it's probably going to be sooner rather than later."