Smith a man of passion

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
After spending time with Barry Smith, you return home. You cut the grass.
You pick the weeds. You dust. You vacuum. You wash the car. You wash the
truck.
The man has passion and enthusiasm and exuberance and energy, and all of it
is infectious.
Smith, the new head coach of the Kamloops Blazers, is a sick man. And he
knows it. He has the coaching disease.
“Is it a disease? I think so. I have it,” he says. “People say I have a
passion and I think it comes out how much I love it. I think about it all
the time.
“You know what? It’s a fun disease.”
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Smith, who is into his 15th season as a coach, spent nine years in the
Vancouver Canucks’ organization, the last five with the NHL team as an
assistant under Marc Crawford and then Alain Vigneault. When Mike Gillis
replaced the fired Dave Nonis as general manager after last season, Smith
and fellow assistant coach Mike Kelly were fired.
“It always hurts,” Smith, 47, says of being fired, although he quickly adds
that this was the first time that he actually was fired. “Every time I got
let go I was at the end of my contract,” he explains. “I never lost my job
in the middle of a season or when there was time left on my contract.”
Until May 22.
“It hurts because I thought I gave them nine great years,” Smith says. “I
thought I had a lot to do with the successful years.”
He pauses . . . grins . . . laughs.
“You know,” he says, “I was the only coach there who won two Northwest
Division championships.”
That and a couple of bucks, he found out, will get him a cup of coffee.
“That first week . . . a lot of people called, a lot of great people
called,” Smith says. “They tell you, ‘It’s going to work out. Good things
come to good people,’ and all those things. And it’s great to hear. But
after that . . .”
After that, there is self-doubt.
“Did I do anything wrong? No, I didn’t,” Smith says. “It has happened to a
lot better guys than me. Then thoughts creep in: Will I get another job?
Then I realized I will get back in.”
He did get back in, signing a three-year contract with the Blazers on July
3. And, he says, things couldn’t be better.
His wife, Carolyn, told him: “You’ve got the job you always wanted.”
Craig Bonner, the Blazers’ general manager who also is in his first season,
was impressed with Smith right from the get-go.
“He’s very much a detail guy,” Bonner said. “He’s very well-prepared and he
has energy. And I was impressed with how badly he wanted a job . . . this
job.”
“To come into here . . .,” Smith says, “it’s like going to coach in
Montreal. Seriously.”
Smith doesn’t try to hide the fact that he wants back into the NHL,
preferably as a head coach. But being head coach of the Blazers, he says,
allows him to deal from a position of strength. In fact, if he’s still here
10 years from now, he says he won’t be disappointed.
“You love it where you are,” he says. “If you stay here 10 years, you’re
staying for a reason — the people in the community, a situation that you
love. You sit back and take the job you want and you love the one you’re in.
I love the one I’m in.”
“If somebody came along and said, ‘You can be the head coach in Atlanta or
somewhere where things aren’t going right or never going to change
direction,’ well, it’s a pretty sweet deal I’ve got right here. So you can
say, ‘I’ll wait until something opens up in a premier market.’ ”
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Coaching is a disease that Smith knows is in his body’s every pore.
But, he says, “I don’t think it consumes me in a bad way.”
His players, indeed everyone in the organization, had best recognize that
Smith is a hockey man. Period.
He and Carolyn, his wife of 18 years, and their three boys have a rare
relationship — he coaches here, they live in Whitefish, Montana.
“Is it ideal? No,” he explains, adding that this kind of separation is
something he and Carolyn had planned for, but . . .
“We’re a really close family . . . we probably did it earlier than we
thought,” he explains. “When our kids started into high school, that was
enough. The oldest is in ninth grade now. Kids get into school and get going
with their programs and they should know exactly what’s going on. Now they
don’t have to worry about Dad coming home, or Dad was home and he left. This
way, they know we’ll see him at Christmas, we’ll see him at spring break.
“And, say what you want, you take the game home with you.”
Carolyn is from Montana and, with the NHL in lockout mode for 2004-05, the
Smiths were in Whitefish.
“We were at a high school football game,” Barry recalls. “She said, ‘This is
the place.’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ ”
They bought a lot the next day.
And, while Barry coaches in Kamloops, Carolyn, Maxl, 14, Gage, 12, and
Hutton, 8, are in Whitefish.
“My wife is a saint without a doubt to take care of the three boys,” Smith
offers.
As for the boys‚ names, Dad chuckles, grins and explains: “We had to name
them different. Geez, their name is Smith. My dad’s name is Bob.”
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Smith was born in Stambaugh, Mich., a community of about 1,200 people that
merged with Mineral Hills in 2000 and became Iron River. His father, Bob,
who turned 80 this year, was a vice-president with a mining company.
His family — including his mother, Dolores, two older sisters and two older
brothers — moved to Farmington, a community 60 miles south of St. Louis, in
1967. Smith was six years of age; the St. Louis Blues had just been born.
This is where you find the roots of Smith’s love affair with hockey.
“The guys seemed so down to earth and real to me,” he says. “The Plagers.
Garry Unger. They were very normal kind of guys. I thought it was a neat
background coming from little towns in Canada. For some reason that made a
quick connection with me.”
Later, his family ended up in Wenatchee, Wash., where Smith played most of
his minor hockey. He would end up at the U of Alaska/Anchorage.
His plan then didn’t include coaching. While he was playing hockey, he
wasn’t thinking about the NHL. Rather, he thought the FBI was in his future.
“I wanted something on the edge a little bit,” he explains. To get into the
FBI, he says, one needed a degree in accounting, law or linguistics. Which
is why he majored in accounting.
“I always had a plan just in case,” Smith says, adding that he spent 21/2
years in university and never got his degree, something he regrets.
The urge to compete, however, took him out of school and into the lower
echelons of minor pro hockey.
“I love to compete; I love to win,” Smith says. “I’m one of those people . .
. touch you last. You know what I mean.”
Now he’s on the verge of giggling.
“Little kids in the car,” he says, with a chuckle. “I touch you last and I
got out of the car. I’m one of those guys.”
He is laughing at the memory.
Smith ended up in the Atlantic Coast Hockey League and then went to Great
Britain. Numbers at hockeydb.com show him with 160 points and 191 penalty
minutes one season and 139 penalty minutes in another. Those numbers, he
claims, aren’t correct, but he owns up to having “probably 30 majors” his
first season in the ACHL, when he is shown to have had 172 penalty minutes
with the Erie Golden Blades.
“I was still in that ‘touch-you-last’ mode,” he says. “Was I good at it? No.
But I thought I was a competitor. In England, I was probably more of an
idiot . . . frustrated because the refereeing and the game were not the
same.”
It was while in Great Britain that he got his first taste of coaching.
“I love coaching,” he says. He especially enjoys the opportunity to build
something, be it a power play or an entire team. “You start from practices
to putting it into games, refining it, bringing a group of guys together to
achieve one thing — to win. I love that competing. Nothing’s better . . .
and I felt that in Vancouver when we had those special teams, the West Coast
Express going and they come together and and you see it come together and
you see the team build and work toward one goal, that’s fun. That’s fun.”
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If Smith doesn’t succeed at this level, it won’t be because he isn’t
passionate, enthusiastic, energetic or organized. He is all of those and
then some.
“I really think (being organized) is important,” says the coach who had his
entire season, practices included, mapped out by early August. “If the
players know you’re organized and if you have it laid out, they understand
that you’re serious and that you have a plan and they are willing to listen
to that plan.
“If you come in and it’s five minutes before practice and you’re throwing a
practice together, they know it.”
Smith also says he treats those practices like rare gems.
“My big thing is that when we go out there and run a practice, it’s sharp,”
he said. “We want the players to be sharp. We want high tempo . . . If we
want them to be sharp, we have to be sharp. It starts with us.
“Whatever you do in practice is what you’re going to do in a game. Your
habits, what we do, those types of things. Practice is huge, especially at
this level, for development and what you want to teach.”
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And now Barry Smith finds himself in Kamloops, at the helm of the Blazers, a
team that won three Memorial Cups in four seasons not that long ago but has
since been to hell and back two or three times.
The fan base has eroded. There are some who feel the team is close to being
irrelevant in the community. Smith is adamant that he won’t let that happen.
He also says there isn’t any pressure.
“Pressure is what you make of it,” he says. “You can succumb to it or rise
up and over it. It’s fun.
“I haven’t worked a day in my life.”

gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca