The Road to High Point
Tubby Smith
I’ve been a basketball coach for 47 years and counting, and I still love every day of it. I would say that even if I had spent all 47 years at my first stop, Great Mills High School in southern Maryland. But I have had some amazing opportunities—twelve different stops along the way, including Division I head coaching jobs at Georgia, Kentucky, and Minnesota. My teams have been to the Sweet 16 nine times, and in 1998 we won the national championship at Kentucky.
I’m grateful for every one of the highs and lows on this road, and even more, for every young man I have been able to influence along the way. I’ve come full circle, as I’m now the head coach at my alma mater, High Point University. We have considerable talent here at High Point, and I look forward to creating more coaching memories. But when I reflect on my nearly seven decades of life, I’m keenly grateful for my upbringing and the values my parents put into me—values that have allowed me to see every part of this eventful coaching career as a gift from God.
My mom and dad raised seventeen kids on a Maryland farm by staying fixed on hard work, discipline, and faith. We didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was 15, and everything we ate we grew right there on our land. Every morning before I got on the school bus, I had to feed the hogs, feed the chickens, cut wood, and haul water. Even though my life and career look very different from that life on the farm, I have tried to reflect my dad’s character as a coach, husband, and father.
Even though he lived all of his life in rural Maryland, my dad’s example taught me to approach each new challenge with courage. As long as I had my family and my faith, I didn’t need to fear the unknown. I could just embrace each new door God opened for me. I have never applied for a job in my life, but those chances came along because of another value I inherited from my dad: hard work. When I asked him if I could use our bush hog to start a lawn business as a teenager, my dad told me, “If you do a good job, you’re going to have more work than you can handle.” If you do the best job you can, wherever you are, people will recognize it.
My father modeled responsibility too; even with seventeen children, he never stepped back from his duty to make sure we were fed, both physically and spiritually. When I was starting to get some attention as a high school basketball player (at Great Mills, the school that gave me my first coaching job), I was bragging to my mom one day about how I would soon make plenty of money and take care of her.
My dad overheard me and came into the room, tears forming in his eyes behind his glasses. "Boy, let me tell you something,” he said to me. “I take care of you; I take care of your mom. That's my responsibility. You don't owe your mom and me anything. When you get your own family, you take care of your family the way I'm taking care of my family.”
He valued all the right things—kindness, good manners, integrity, respect. He raised us to put God first, treat people with honor and see the good in every circumstance. One of the toughest professional moments I’ve faced came in 2018, when my son G.G. was fired as the head coach at Loyola and I was fired at Memphis in the same week. But then the High Point president Nido Qubein, who overlapped with me for two years when we were both HPU students, came calling. Two weeks after Memphis let me go, I was back at my alma mater with my son on my staff. G.G. is named after my dad Guffrie, and that series of events was certainly something he would have smiled about.
At sixty-nine, I am still very much a work in progress. But from the farm to the top of the college basketball world to my current position, my perspective hasn’t changed. I’ve had a beautiful life, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.