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Sam Smith worked for Vicknair at St. Louis High School in Lake Charles from 1996-99, coaching all three of Vicknair’s sons. He left for Texas, eventually becoming offensive coordinator at Tomball, a Class 5A high school near Houston. That’s where Smith was when Vicknair died in September 2008.
“When I left and came to Texas, my relationship with Coach Vic only grew stronger, and we grew closer,” Smith said. “I’m originally from DeQuincy. Mom said that if it weren’t for Coach Vic that I would never come back home and that she would never see me.”
Smith and Vicknair attended nearly every coaching clinic in the region from January to April for 10 years.
“Our wives always joked that we spent more nights together during clinic season than we did with them,” Smith said.
The time together made an impression.
“His passion for the game of football and his wife and family has given me a model that I try to live up to daily,” Smith said.
“He treated me like another son,” he said. “My dad’s still living, and we’re real close, but I always said I felt like Coach Vic was my second dad. He was also such a good mentor.”
One thing coaches learn the longer they stay around the game is how much they don’t know. Smith discovered this while he worked with Vicknair, and he saw something else that stuck. It is a recurring theme in the life of Coach Vic.
“He had a knack of understanding there’s always something else out there about there about the game,” Smith said, “and you can never know everything there is to know about football. He always said it’s a constantly changing game, and he coached for more than 40 years and never let the game pass him by.
“A lot of coaches get in it, and they get to a point where it’s like, ‘I’m done with learning, or I want to take my career in this path,’ and they kind of let the game pass them by. They don’t quit being good coaches, but it’s just the X’s and O’s of the game kind of pass them by. Coach Vic never let that happen.”
More on that later.
Smith said he and Vicknair spoke by phone at least five times a week after Smith left for Texas, extending the friendship for nearly 10 years after their coaching partnership ended. They bounced ideas off each other.
In the football-themed love story “Jerry Maguire,” the agent whose name is the title of the movie has a heated debate with a player he represents. When the agent walks away, the player addresses the nature of the perceived conflict.
“See? That’s the difference between us,” he yells. “You think we’re fighting, and I think we’re finally talking.”
There was no such confusion between Smith and Vicknair, but it wasn’t always obvious to Smith’s wife that the two men, mentor and pupil, were on the same page about the nature of their exchanges even when they weren’t in agreement about the specifics.
“We were at lunch at St. Louis, and we were changing from a split defense to the 4-3, and I’d played in a 4-3 under David Paine at DeQuincy, and so we were talking about linebacker reads and drawing it up on the board during lunch,” Smith said. “In the coaches office, we talked like coaches. We were fussing back and forth, fussing back and forth, and people often said, ‘God almighty, it sounds like y’all hate each other when y’all are talking football.’ Well, no, not at all.
“But my wife walked in while Coach Vic and I were going back with each other, and all of a sudden our tone changed, and she came back later and asked, ‘Well, y’all are not mad at each other?’ We just kind of looked at each other like brothers and said, ‘No, not at all. We’re just talking about football.’ That’s just the type of relationship he had with his coaches, and that’s just how comfortable you always felt with Coach Vic. He never took offense to being questioned because he always questioned everything.”
The first year Smith coached for Vicknair at St. Louis, Smith’s wife taught in Deweyville, Texas. They lived in DeQuincy, roughly halfway between Deweyville and Lake Charles. The next year, the Smiths moved into a house in Lake Charles.
“We had a horse trailer we moved our stuff in, and he and his wife came up and helped us move,”‘ Smith said. “Then they came for the next week and helped us put up new wallpaper and do things like that around the house. That was the type of guy he was. Since then, I’ve never had a head coach offer to help me move. I’ve moved a lot since that second year with Coach Vic, and never since then have I had a head coach do any of that.”
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