“It was kind of surreal. I’m thinking it was for a moment like this that kept us all going in some of those tough times in the past.”
With the 46-14 victory at Northridge Stadium, the Polar Bears — who not that long ago had a pair of winless seasons — won the Three Rivers Conference championship with a 7-0 record. It was their first outright conference crown in the 41 years Smith has coached at the school.
With the victory, 7-3 Northridge earned its first home playoff game in school history. Tonight, it hosts Cincinnati Indian Hill (7-3).
After first-round losses to Eaton (2020), Clinton Massie (2021) and Archbishop McNicholas (2022), Northridge will try to win its first playoff game ever.
After Northridge players shook hands with their Lehman counterparts Friday, they immediately ran to the north end of the field to ring the old red cast iron victory bell that’s mounted on a stand beneath the scoreboard.
Soon Smith was joined by most of his family. Daughter Chelsea, a second-grade teacher at Northridge, carried her 2-month-old daughter Quinn, and daughter Kristin brought two-year old son Calvin, who loves being at the games and seeing “Papa,” as he calls Smith.
Only Bob’s wife Debra — who just retired after 22 years teaching Northridge first and second graders — was missing. She was in Florida.
Smith talked about all this as he sat in his office in the stadium before practice earlier this week. The wall behind his desk was decorated with small photos of several former players and, most prominently, his longtime mentor and friend, the late Northridge coach Butch MacPherson.
Off to one side was a sign bearing the maxim that now holds more meaning than ever:
“Never let yesterday’s disappointments overshadow tomorrow’s dreams.”
Smith has tried to ingrain that sentiment into his players over the years, especially as they worked to reverse an 0-9 mark in 2020, an 0-10 campaign in 2017, and even this year’s 0-3 start in non-league play.
He talked about how they worked as hard and dreamed as big as the players on the Miami Valley’s perennial powerhouses:
“I’ve always believed these kids could be successful in anything they wanted to do on or off the field. I could see it in their faces — just what it meant to them — when they did have success. I know because once I was one of them, too.”
Few, if any, Miami Valley coaches are as tied to their school as is the 62-year-old Smith.
He grew up on Division Avenue just a few blocks from the school. From the time they were first Northridge first graders, he and his best friend, Jimmy Pollard, would come to Polar Bears football and basketball games and later each had their own sports careers there.
A multi-sport athlete, Smith made a name for himself as a football player for MacPherson, and his senior year he was recruited by the University of Dayton’s head coach, Rick Carter, who came to several of his football and basketball games and visited him at school.
“That meant a lot,” he said. “He really took an interest in me.”
Then Smith started to laugh: “And there also was the AstroTurf (at Welcome Stadium, UD’s home field). Whoa! That was a big deal man. AstroTurf!”
That’s before he knew the downside of often-treacherous surface that caused too many torn ACLs and ripped the skin off any body surface that slid forcefully on it.
A free safety for the Flyers, Smith was a freshman on the 1980 Division III national championship team that trounced Ithaca, 63-0, in Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl, and he played on the ‘81 team that finished as national runners up.
He’s still in the Flyers record book. His three interceptions against Wisconsin Whitewater in 1983 are tied for the most picks ever in a single game.
After graduating in 1984, he spent a few months in Anaheim, California, — where his grandparents lived, and he had some UD friends living — and hoped to get into the fitness business.
The cost of living brought him back to Dayton and after just one day with his dad doing concrete work, he listened to MacPherson, applied to be a substitute teacher at Northridge and had a classroom job by nightfall.
MacPherson made him an assistant varsity coach and he’s been on the Polar Bears sidelines since — 41 seasons in all — and 21 as the head coach after Butch retired in 2004.
He’s also been an ultra-successful track coach at the school for 41 years, and earlier in his career he coached 18 years of basketball and one season of wrestling.
In those four-plus decades, he’s missed just one day of school because his wife had surgery. And as a Northridge student, he said he only missed “one or two days” of school: “It wasn’t something hammered into me.
“I like being here.”
Mom and Mac
After his parents split up when he was in third grade, Smith and his two sisters lived with his mom, Teresa, who taught him his work ethic.
“She worked two jobs — at places like Foreman Industries, Bordan’s and Dayton Bobcat – and she also worked weekends at the Buckhorn Tavern. She ended up having her own catering business and just retired a few years ago.”
He and some buddies were doing extra work — running mornings at DeWeese Park before summer football practices began at Northridge — when he met MacPherson, then the coach at Jefferson, after serving in the Marines, working a decade in Dayton factories and, at age 32, becoming Central State’s quarterback.
“When we were out running, we’d see this old Ford pickup pull up and this guy would jump out and start running every day,” Smith once told me. “It was Mac, and one day, he sees our Northridge shirts and starts talking.
“After awhile I started running with him and I’m telling you, I was a teenager, and he had to be almost 40 and it took everything I had to keep up with him. Then, my senior year, he took over the job at Northridge.
“He wasn’t just my coach. Over the years he became a mentor, a father figure and my best friend. Later he was a grandfather figure to our daughters.”
The MacPherson and Smith families took vacations together, spent holidays together and became entwined in each other’s lives.
When the 82-year-old MacPherson’s health failed while in Chicago in 2022 as he visited his son Matt — then a Northwestern assistant football coach — Smith and his wife Debra were able to get up there and spend some time with him.
In a final private moment, Smith said was able to tell mentor and friend that he loved him and what a good dad he had been.
Special relationships
The other morning — as is the case every day — Smith was at school by 5:20 to spend 30 minutes riding a stationary bike in the weight room. Three times a week he lifts weights.
Over the years, when he worked late in his office breaking down film after a Friday night game to prepare for Saturday morning’s team meeting, he’d simply sleep on a cot he kept in his office.
When Smith said Northridge was special to him, he was talking about more than just the games he’s played in and coached. He focused on his current football staff, the coaches he started with and Steve Szekely, another mentor, longtime teacher and coach at the school.
Smith’s now a physical education and weight training teacher, but for 17 years he taught special education, and when you listen to him talk about it, you hear the pride and gratification he got from those times:
“Back then, everything was functional for the kids. Eileen McBride was the other teacher, and we had jobs in school for the kids and they were paid. We took them to the bank, and they had savings accounts and could balance a checkbook. ... And they could use a tape measure.
“We took them on three or four trips a month. They went on job interviews and out to eat. We went on the RTA, so they knew how to get around.”
He said they really blossomed.
The same can be said this season for the Polar Bears football team, which has some real standouts, including Teon Hill, the muscular 5-foot-5 running back and defensive back who has rushed for close to 1,700 yards and has 22 touchdowns; wide receiver/ linebacker Ja’Dynn Martin, who won all-state honors last season; 240-pound junior lineman Camron Moss; and quarterback Dorryen Davis, who Smith said has thrown for close to 1,900 yards and 20 touchdowns against just three interceptions.
Northridge has at least 10 grads playing college football now, and one alum, Drew Ogletree, is a tight end with Indianapolis Colts.
Smith said Ogletree — who starred at Findlay and Youngstown State before becoming a sixth-round draft pick in 2022 — comes back in the offseason.
But Smith said he looks forward just as much to the return of former players who didn’t experience such great football success — individually or record-wise at Northridge — but have achieved in other areas:
“It means the world to me when former players come back and say that I’ve made a difference in their lives and then they share their successes in their careers and their family lives.
“It feels good to know they learned some things here that are helping them now.”
And that goes back to that maxim mounted on the wall:
“Never let yesterday’s disappointments overshadow tomorrow’s dreams.”
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