Dave Smith: Once a Tiger, Always a Tiger

By Mark Tindall

Dave Smith went straight from graduating from college to working for the same college, and from playing for a team to coaching the same team within one year.

Graduating from Trinity in 2003 and becoming the full-time pitching coach in 2004, Smith, 39, has been the pitching coach for Trinity baseball for 16 years, the same team he once played for as a pitcher. During his coaching tenure at Trinity, the baseball team won a national title in 2016, after having made the program’s first NCAA College World Series the year before.

While he was getting his master’s degree in accounting at Trinity, Smith started working as a graduate assistant coach for the baseball team. He had planned on playing basketball as a graduate student , but the head baseball coach convinced him to help out as an assistant. That year the other assistant coach had left and the pitching coach position was vacant. The following year, he finished his master’s program and became the full-time pitching coach.

Besides coaching, Smith has another job. He works at a financial firm during the day, and in the afternoons and evenings he comes to Trinity to help prepare the field for practices and games.

“Working two jobs is a lot like what I did in college,” Smith says, in the sense that he has to balance two very different worlds: baseball and school in the past, and now baseball and business.

But that doesn’t seem to impede one bit Smith’s dedication to the team. “He is usually the first person to the field and the last person to leave, making sure everything is ready to go before practice and games and making sure the field looks cleaned up afterwards,” says Troy Nelson, a 2017 Trinity grad and current assistant coach. “I noticed his dedication to the program a lot as a player but never realized just how much work he does on a daily basis until I started to work alongside him as an assistant coach.”

In fact, Smith didn’t plan on being a coach when he graduated from college, but it was something that “fell into [his] lap,” he says. “I tried it and I loved it, and it’s been kind of a passion for me ever since,” he adds.

He has used that new-found passion to help drive his players. Brian Cardone, a current pitcher, says Smith is "good about seeing the potential we have, and he makes it a part of his goal to help us achieve our goals.” Such a drive has helped Smith assist the Trinity baseball team not only in winning a national championship in 2016, but also reaching the NCAA regionals in 2004, 2006, 2008, and every year in between 2010 and 2016.

Smith says that he cherishes the relationships he builds with players, and loves trying to find ways to help them improve on and off the field. “The more experience you have, the better coach you will be,” Smith says he’s always been told. “Every interaction with a player and every situation that you deal with helps form an experience."