Martin Smith, OU on the Right Track

I remember the night Joe Castiglione called me at home to tell me we had hired a new track and field coach. The excitable Italian was excited even for him.

He told me almost breathlessly, “We've hired Martin Smith.” And then there was silence.

With apologies to Coach Smith, I was not all that hip to track and field coaching circles. Even with a limited high school cross country career, I didn't realize the monumental hiring Joe had just pulled off.

I think I came up with some sort of response that helped me avoid the “idiot” tag and then Joe said this... “Trust me, it will get the attention of the Big 12 and national communities.”

And it did. Smith, in just his second year in Norman, ended the men's track and field conference title drought of 29 years when the Sooners won last weekend's championship at Lincoln, Neb.

The women were sixth and they're coming.

This has been a year of great coaching jobs at Oklahoma. I wrote in this space earlier this school year about the remarkable reclamation work of Santiago Restrepo in volleyball. Now Smith has taken another program long mired in something less than mediocrity and placed a Big 12 trophy on the mantel.

Let that soak in for a moment. In the 10 years prior to Smith's arrival in Norman, the OU men had finished no better than fourth in the Big 12, and they did that only twice. Their average finish in that stretch was, gulp, seventh.

In two years, Smith took the OU men from 10th , their finish the year before he arrived, to first.

The women were dead last the year before he got here. Last year they moved to 10th and this year they were sixth, their best finish since 2001.

Not long after that above-mentioned phone call with Joe C., I called Coach Smith to get quotes for the announcement of his hiring. That phone conversation took me back more than 10 years when I wrote about another hiring, the one telling everyone that Kansas State had hired a football coach named Bill Snyder.

Anybody that knows Snyder considers him one-of-a-kind. I did too until I spoke with Smith.

Honestly, I probably don't know either one of them well enough to draw a comparison, but they both possess one quality that is unmistakable. Both have an uncanny ability to live beyond the moment.

Snyder's team scored a thrilling comeback over North Texas to get his first win at KSU and end a long string of futility. As I walked the coach to the interview room that day I was as giddy as an eight-week old puppy.

He looked at me like I had lost my mind.

Snyder's thoughts were somewhere in the future. On that staircase leading from the locker room to the interview room I was the only dork living in the moment.

Coach Smith strikes me the same way. He enjoys his athletes and appreciates the victories, but I get the distinct feeling that he'll probably wait until retirement to sit back and really squeeze all of the happiness out of a career that as either a head or assistant coach has yielded 25 conference and five national championships. In the meantime, his focus is on bigger prizes and the championships yet to be won.

And that's fine. It's an approach that works for him.

As for me, I'm bounding through the hallways, screaming like a mad man.

Mossman Prophecies Archive

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Kenny Mossman, Associate Athletics Director for Communications, provides his perspective on Oklahoma Athletics in his regular column on SoonerSports.com.

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