Coachspeak: Dunbar football coach Lawrence Smith
Lawrence Smith succeeded his mentor Ben Eaton as Dunbar's football coach in 2007 after the beloved Eaton's sudden death. Since then, he has carried on Eaton's legacy, adding three state championships to two won by Eaton's teams and two won by Stanley Mitchell's teams.
The Poets, ranked No. 5 in preseason, have won five Class 1A crowns in the last seven years including last fall's. A Dunbar graduate, Smith played football and baseball for the Poets and became an assistant coach under Eaton in 2001.
Saturday night at Morgan State, the Poets open their season with their first-ever meeting with Dunbar of Washington, D.C. at the I-95 Kickoff Classic. Game time is 7:45.
Smith talked with us about the new season and the Dunbar football legacy.
Winning a state championship with a young team has pushed expectations very high for this year. The team’s goal is always to win a state title, but how do you keep the pressure off the kids?
I always say that last year they were the hunter and now they’re the hunted. A lot of people didn’t expect them to win last year. Now, they can’t be complacent or think it’s going to happen easily, because now people are after them.
The team made a lot of turnovers last season but almost always pulled through. How does that ability to recover help the team this season?
Last year, we had a great defense and that helped us out. To this day, I don’t know how we won so many games turning the ball over so much. That’s definitely what we have to cut down on this year, turning the ball over, but that helped them out because they stayed strong. One thing about last year’s team, they never thought they were out of the game no matter how many times they turned the ball over.
How do you keep the kids focused when you go through a stretch like last year’s of six games in which you outscored the opposition, 254-0?
You’ve got to keep them hungry. They don’t want to lose. They’ve got to understand that they’re Dunbar. I say to every team it’s not because of what they’re doing that teams are after them, it’s because of what previous teams have done. Every year because you’re playing for Dunbar, people are really not going to lay down. People are going to give you their best game. Regardless of who we play – it could be a team with no wins or it could be a team that’s undefeated – they’re going to give us their best game because they’re playing against Dunbar.
How have you managed to maintain the consistency of this program through the four years since Coach Eaton’s death?
I’ve got great (assistant) coaches and that’s one thing I’ve learned. I have great mentors, Bob Wade, Biff Poggi, Bill MGregor, Doug Duvall. All these guys have mentored me. I remember when I became a head coach, Roger Wrenn and Bill McGregor telling me the first year when we won (the state championship) in '07 and everyone was happy for you. They said it’s easy to win the first one, but it’s hard to stay there. I remember Doug Duvall bringing me and my family out to his house and he sat down and he gave me a book and he talked to me on how to be a head coach. The perception that a lot of coaches mishandle when they become head coaches is when you’re a head coach, you’re more of an administrator. You’ve got to be able to have coaches that you trust and be able to run what you want to run in order to make your program successful. I’ve learned, from the years being an assistant to me being a head coach, that I am blessed with having great assistant coaches and great kids to make it easy and for us to continue being a success every year.
What’s the most interesting thing about the Dunbar-Dunbar match-up Saturday night?
It’s interesting because we’re so close and we’ve wanted to make this a rivalry. My years of being at Dunbar, Dunbar-Dunbar has always been a basketball rivalry, because they also have a great basketball tradition there. We’ve wanted to do this from when (Craig) Jeffries was still head coach there before coach (Ashaa) Cherry took over. We wanted to get together, because they have been just as successful as we have with the number of folks they have put in college making a mark and the number of guys they have put in the NFL making a mark. So this is something we wanted to put together and the I-95 Classic and Tony Kennedy and them just came in and made it better, putting this on that stage. There’s no other game being played in the state at the time we’re playing, so we’re expecting a big crowd and we know it’s going to be a great game. We just know it’s going to be a great atmosphere Saturday night.
