Turning Prodigies into Pros: The Oak Hill Basketball Family

“Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.” —Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

The first new automobile Steve Smith ever purchased, a stripped-down, bronze-gold Mazda 626, was barreling through some blistering heat in the Appalachian Mountains with the windows down on the last Sunday of August 1983. He was zooming out of Kentucky with a heavy foot on the gas pedal, pushing through southern Virginia, not too far from the North Carolina border.

A bank cashier, Smith was driving to interview for a job as an assistant basketball coach, and he was running late.

Three weeks prior, he’d moved into a new apartment with his pregnant wife, Lisa. Now, he was thinking about relocating six hours away from their home in Wilmore, Kentucky, to a place called Mouth of Wilson, Virginia, a quaint village with a population of about 100 people that was surrounded by rolling green hills, Christmas tree and tobacco farms and grazing cattle.

Larry Davis, his best friend and former college classmate, had just been named the head basketball coach at Oak Hill Academy, the tiny, isolated boarding school in Mouth of Wilson in the rustic Blue Ridge Mountains. He phoned Smith with an intriguing proposition.

“Larry called me and wanted to know if I’d be his assistant coach,” said Smith, who’d basically learned to walk on a basketball court while trailing behind his father, Winston, who was a head coach at a number of small colleges in Ohio, Indiana, California and Kentucky. “I missed basketball. I wanted to coach, and I wanted to teach.”

He interviewed for a job as a biology teacher and Larry’s assistant with the basketball team and was surprised when he got the job.

“I went back to Kentucky, took my wife and son home from the hospital. We got packed up and moved into our house on Oak Hill’s campus two weeks later,” said Smith. “At the time, I didn’t think I’d be here that long. We’ve been here ever since.”

Steve Smith is now a legendary icon in prep basketball circles. His teams have won eight national championships during his 31-year tenure at Oak Hill that began after a two-year stint as an assistant coach. Those title squads have a combined record of 289 wins and four losses.

This year, he was nominated for the Basketball Hall of Fame and achieved the remarkable milestone of eclipsing 1,000 coaching victories on Dec. 29 when the Warriors beat Oregon’s West Linn High School 77-47 in the semifinal of the Les Schwab Invitational in Portland, Oregon.

The Warriors wrapped up their season on Saturday, April 2nd, in New York’s Madison Square Garden, where they defeated Indiana’s La Lumiere School 62-60 in overtime to capture the championship of the DICK’s High School Nationals.They finished the year with a record of 45-1 and were the No. team in the country in USA Today’s Super 25 boys basketball rankings.

The night prior to the release of the new Air Jordan XXX, on Thursday, Feb. 11, Oak Hill kicks off the NBA All-Star festivities in Toronto as the marquee attraction of the inaugural Jordan Brand Invitational, when it took on Ontario’s No. 1-ranked team, Orangeville Prep, the school that most recently produced Kentucky star freshman Jamal Murray.

As NBA players Bismack Biyombo, Andre Drummond and Victor Oladipo sit courtside, Steve Smith is stationed on the bench with his arms crossed, dressed nattily in stylish blue slacks, the brown shoes of an investment banker and a crisp, light blue starched shirt underneath a chic burgundy sweater. He looks serious yet serene and relaxed.

His austere, green-eyed gaze, however, provides some evidence of the competitive embers burning inside him. He occasionally leans forward in his chair during the game, extending a fist. His hand is adorned with the gold national championship ring from 2012 that is the size of a small boulder.

In sideline huddles, he doesn’t scream. He looks his players in the eye with more of a grandfatherly affection than a menacing glare. They lean in and stare back at him, digesting every syllable.

At halftime, Smith walks over to embrace Carmelo before heading back to the locker room. They smile widely, affectionately. It’s obvious that the relationship is meaningful for both of them.

“Coach Smith changed my whole perspective going from Baltimore to Mouth of Wilson, Virginia,” said Anthony. “If it wasn’t for him helping me through that transition at Oak Hill, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you now.

“It was two entirely different worlds. I went from running the streets and being out all night to having a curfew, having to make my bed every day, eating and going to sleep at a certain time. Being told what to do and being surrounded by all that structure was definitely an adjustment.”

After Oak Hill’s 77-67 victory, Quinn Cook, a point guard on Duke’s national championship-winning squad last year— this season he played for the Canton Charge in the NBA Development League—emerges from the locker room before Smith and the rest of the team and reflects on the time he spent in Mouth of Wilson.

“I wouldn’t have experienced the success I did in college if it wasn’t for Oak Hill,” said Cook, a native of Washington, D.C. “Coach Smith is like a second father to me. He’d pull me into his office to talk about everything but basketball.

“He wanted to know how I was doing, how I was dealing with the experience. Growing up with a single mom, he stepped up and became a major part of my life. I remember crying in his arms when he told me that I’d been named a McDonald’s All-American and how he hugged me when I graduated, telling me how proud he and my parents were of the growth I’d shown that year.”

Seven years before Smith came to work at Oak Hill in 1983, Chuck Eisner, the son of the school’s president, came up with the idea of establishing a high-powered hoops program.

Oak Hill Academy was established in 1878, founded by the New River Baptist Association as a school for kids growing up in the mountains. During the 1950s, it grew into a coed boarding school that specialized in helping unmotivated students realize their academic potential.

By 1976, enrollment was decreasing and expenses began outpacing revenue. With his father’s blessing, Chuck went to the playgrounds of New York City armed with a handful of scholarships and a dream of making the school a big-time player on the high school hoops landscape.

Oak Hill had fielded some pretty good teams by the time Smith got there, but it had never had a player like the one who was flying in from New York and looking to get his academics up to par so he could qualify for a college scholarship.

“Back then, we had some good teams with three or four guys who were going to play Division I basketball,” said Smith. “The rest of the guys were role players. No one really knew who Oak Hill was. That changed when Rod Strickland got here.”

Strickland had just won a state championship at Truman High School in the Bronx as a junior.

“We got a call from Steve Lappas, his high school coach, along with Lou D’Almeida, who ran the Bronx Gauchos program,” said …

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