Coach Is Back Where He Belongs

Okanogan’s Smith returns to sidelines after heart scare ||

YAKIMA, Wash. — The first time Gary Smith felt the pain in his chest, he blamed it on all that red meat. Not eating it. Lifting it.

A neighbor near Smith’s ranch on the outskirts of Omak raises beef cattle, and Smith, coach of the Okanogan girls basketball team playing at the SunDome in this week’s 1A state tournament, had hauled several boxes of fresh-cut beef from his car inside to the freezer.

Okanogan High School girls' basketball coach Gary Smith talks to his team during the first quarter of a game March 3, 2010 at the state class 1A basketball tournament in Yakima. Though he had major heart surgery last season he's back on the sidelines coaching. (Gordon King/Yakima Herald-Republic)

“I thought I’d pulled a muscle because I’d lifted those boxes out of the car,” Smith, 69, recalls of a series of events that began in December 2008.

So he took half a pain pill he still had lying around from a shoulder surgery, and he felt fine. The next night the pain returned; he took another half-pill, and the pangs went away. The next night, the same thing.

He just wasn’t worried about it.

“The thing is, I don’t drink, smoke or chew. Never have. I exercise, I eat good stuff,” says Smith.

So the night after that first pain in the chest, Smith did what came naturally to the guy who demands solid physical conditioning from every football, track and basketball team he has coached: He worked out.

“I went down and did 20 minutes on the elliptical,” he says. “I could have dropped dead on the elliptical.”

He didn’t find that out, though, until his fourth straight night of chest pain, which came while he was in Wenatchee after scouting a game involving a future opponent. He and his wife, Dannis, headed to the emergency room at Central Washington Hospital, just to be safe.

The only thing good about the news was that Smith received it before it was too late.

“My blood pressure was 217 over 104,” he said. “The doctors said, my gosh, when you’re in the 220s you’re having a heart attack.”

They also said Smith had three major arterial blockages and that they needed to do open heart surgery. Now.

•   •   •   •

That Gary Smith was once again coaching, after state high school hall-of-fame coaching careers in both football and track (and state titles in both) and after taking girls teams to the state title game at both Omak and Tonasket, is simply because he has to coach.

Already long retired, Smith had left Tonasket after 10 years as girls coach so he could coach his grandsons in second- and third-grade basketball. When the boys moved with their mom to Bellevue, though, there was just too much time in the day. Smith grew restless.

“My wife said, you’ve got to do something, you’re driving me crazy,” Smith recalls with a grin. So when the Okanogan girls job opened up, he took it.

Three games later, he had those chest pains and what turned out to be a quintuple bypass and eight nights in the hospital.

Doctors told Gary and Dannis Smith his coaching days were over. Gary, naturally, talked a nurse into bringing a VCR to his room so he could grade the game film Dannis had shot at the game they had scouted. “So,” Dannis says with a sigh, “he was still in the game.”

At the end of his hospital stay, Smith says, his doctor told him, “After knowing you for eight days, I can see you maybe going back to the school and sitting in a chair and coaching from there …”

•   •   •   •

The sitting down, though, was critical. And, for now, only at practices. The doctors were having none of Smith being jostled around on a team bus, and gesticulating and storming the sidelines at games was out of the question — it might split open the breastbone, still healing from the surgery.

So he sat at practice for two weeks. And at every practice, Dannis would sit behind him, making sure he didn’t even think about getting out of his chair.

He was still weak as a kitten. “I’d be talking and I’d just run out of air,” Smith says. And if he deigned to rise, either Dannis or one of the girls would demand, “Sit down, coach!” And he would.

Smith was back coaching games by the last month of the season, though assistant coach Kevin Daling did all the standing up. The Bulldogs finished with a 10-13 record, and this year — with a clean bill of health, a team with three freshman starters and only one senior, and the energy of a man with a new heart — Smith has worked yet another coaching miracle.

His team has won 22 of 24 games, with a date in today’s quarterfinals against Connell, which upset top-ranked, defending champion Seattle Christian.

Dannis carries her husband’s nitroglycerin tablets should his heart pains return, but he’s never taken a one. And Smith — ever the coach — believes coaching may well have saved his life.

“Things worked out,” he says. “If I hadn’t been down there scouting in Wenatchee, where they have that big hospital, I could be dead.”

Nope. Gary Smith’s basketball team is still alive. And so is their coach.