'Win anyway': On Eddie Smith, 4 years in Longview and cherishing HBPs

Washington's new baseball coach ran his first college program on toughness and accountability.

Eddie Smith can tell you where the squirrel bridges are.

At least, he should be able to. Washington’s new baseball coach grew up in Olympia and played junior-college ball in Centralia, but his first head coaching job was in Longview, home of the Nutty Narrows, where the Lower Columbia College Red Devils have established as the premier program in the Northwest Athletic Conference (NWAC). 

It was a thriving operation long before Smith’s arrival, though he became an accomplished steward. Kelly Smith — no relation — coached there 18 seasons, winning five NWAC championships and finishing as runner-up seven times. When he retired after the 2012 season, LCC athletic director Kirc Roland hired Donegal Fergus to replace him. But Fergus was gone after a year, accepting an offer to join the staff of Lindsay Meggs at UW en route to becoming a Division 1 head coach himself.

Roland had interviewed Eddie Smith when he hired Fergus. They were the two finalists before Smith withdrew, instead spending that season as an assistant at Notre Dame, his alma mater. Rather than begin the process anew following Fergus’ departure, Roland said, “I went right back to Eddie.”

LCC missed the NWAC tournament in Smith’s first season, which doesn’t happen often. The next year, though, the Devils won the championship, finished the season ranked No. 10 nationally by Perfect Game, and the American Baseball Coaches Association named Smith its national coach of the year. 

Two years later, LCC won another NWAC title, and Smith left for a job as hitting coach and head recruiter at Tulane. It was the fourth of Smith’s five D1 assistant jobs. He coached at Notre Dame, where he walked on as a player after his two-year career in Centralia. Prior to a one-year stop at Santa Clara, Smith coached at Virginia, where he was part of the Cavaliers’ first two College World Series appearances. 

After two seasons at Tulane — a record-setting period for the Green Wave’s offense — Smith took a job as hitting coach at LSU, where he spent two seasons before taking the head coaching job at Utah Valley. UVU finished 10-47 in 2021, the year before he arrived. In 2023, they won 34 games and advanced to the WAC tournament championship game, and won a school-record 18 conference games in 2024.

“Eddie comes in with a clear plan on what he’s going to do for recruiting, a clear plan of practice sessions, a clear plan of fundraising,” Roland said. “Everything is scripted to the minute with clear expectations of what your role is and what you’re supposed to do as a good teammate.”

As Smith embarks on his third head-coaching job, I wondered what he took from his time in Longview.

“I learned a lot,” Smith said. “I learned some things the hard way, and how not to do it, but I also really learned the importance of figuring out a place, figuring out what needed to be done in that moment, which is always going to change with the times and place.

“More than anything, I realized how important it is to have those relationships with the players, and make sure the players are always first, and that everything you’re doing is to get the right players on the bus — and then challenge those players, push those players, but also make sure they know deep down in their core that you really care about them and their development.”

Smith’s motto at LCC, Roland said, was “win anyway.” He put it on hats and shirts, and on a large sign in the dugout.

“Oh, it’s raining outside? Win anyway,” Roland said. “You have to go to class, and we don’t have D1 facilities? Win anyway. Eddie is not an excuse maker. When you have a long road trip and you’re tired from being on a plane and you have to go to Rutgers or wherever — Eddie’s not going to let that be an excuse. Win anyway.”

Though his career has taken him all over, Smith always has cherished his local roots. His coach at Centralia College, Bruce Pocklington, said it wasn’t uncommon for Smith to sleep on his couch when he was in town. Smith signed multiple Washington products to play for him at Utah Valley. When athletic director Pat Chun first reached out about the job, Smith conducted the initial Zoom call from his parents’ house.

“Northwest guy, man,” Roland said. “They’re tougher.”

LCC benefits from greater institutional and community investment than the average junior college, such that its home ballpark, David Story Field, is the permanent host location for the NWAC championships. Any JUCO job presents challenges foreign to those accustomed to the D1 lifestyle, though, and Smith seemed to embrace it all.

For example: the women’s basketball team had an opponent withdraw at the last minute from a tournament it was hosting. They cobbled together a roster of former players to fill the spot, and asked Smith if he wanted to coach them.

“And that was like another bucket-list check for him,” Roland said. “‘Oh my God, I get to coach in a college basketball game?’ He took it so head-on, and you could see the joy in his eyes to do that.”

Borrowing a phrase from former UW football coach Chris Petersen, Smith coached LCC with a “BUILT4LIFE” philosophy structured upon four pillars: athletics, academics, leadership and citizenship. No detail was too small. Expectations were clearly stated for players and assistant coaches alike. Accountability took the form of both negative and positive reinforcement, and Smith believed, as he wrote in a 2018 blog post outlining his approach, “the positive consequences became more powerful than the negative consequences.” Each fall began with a series of “Baseball 101” sessions, held in a classroom, to establish program standards.

Toughness was another cornerstone. “Soft comments,” about weather or the quality of the opponent or bad umpiring, were not tolerated. Smith wanted to practice at game speed, which meant players were expected to slide hard and dive for ground balls. Drills were deliberately constructed to induce some degree of failure. “We designed our preparation this way because people perform to the level of the expectation,” Smith wrote. “While reaching perfection may be impossible, improvement was sure to come along the way.”

Also: “The team would celebrate a two-strike foul ball on a tough pitch while we were on offense, and well-executed PFPs (pitcher’s fielding practice) became sexy on defense. Our dugout would erupt when we got hit by a pitch — an undervalued offensive statistic that we led the entire country in from 2016-2017.”

Not surprisingly, Pocklington recalls Smith asking during his playing days: “‘What’s the hit-by-pitch record?’ Because he was always a magnet, and always finding ways on base.”

It’s why one former college teammate described him as “a pain in the ass to play against,” even as a scrawny infielder. Smith joked that UW was never in the cards for him as a high-school or JUCO prospect, because “I was not good enough as a player.” But nobody was going to outwork him, and nobody knew more about the game.

Most kids have their parents read them books at bedtime. Pocklington said Smith’s father, Ed Sr., a star athlete at Grays Harbor College and Gonzaga and a former coach himself (albeit in basketball), would instead quiz his son on first-and-third scenarios and situational defense. North Thurston went unbeaten and won a state title during Eddie Smith’s senior season in 2002. A decade later, he was inducted into Centralia College’s Hall of Fame. And he fulfilled his dream of attending Notre Dame, and even got to play some as a walk-on.

Washington made its only CWS appearance in 2018, though it was later vacated by the NCAA. Former coach Jason Kelly took UW to the NCAA tournament in his first season, in 2023, but the Huskies posted a 10-20 conference record in 2024 before Kelly left to be pitching coach at Texas A&M.

The SEC and Big Ten might run college football, but the SEC dominates college baseball all by itself. Washington has never been an easy job, considering geography and inconsistent postseason history, though the Huskies always have produced MLB draft picks and can boast a picturesque home stadium.

Smith, as you might imagine, sees nothing but upside. 

“There’s absolutely nothing this place can’t offer,” he said. “If you’re looking for a place to go excel, this has it all — player development, elite education, world-class city. What else could you ask for?”

Pocklington drove up to Seattle this week for Smith’s introductory press conference. Former teammates and coaches packed the Wayne Gittinger team room up the first base line inside Husky Ballpark. When Smith finished speaking, an old teammate remarked to Pocklington: “Boy, he was really prepared.”

“Yeah,” Pocklington replied. “Go figure.”

UW is not LCC, and Seattle isn’t Longview. But maybe Smith will bring with him the same mentality birthed by a drive down Industrial Way one morning early in his LCC tenure. He was headed out fishing at 4:15 a.m., yet countless trucks packed the highway, hauling timber in and out of a city whose oldest high school’s athletic teams call themselves the Lumberjacks.

“I was immediately inspired,” Smith wrote, “and thought to myself how I wanted to make sure our team always had the toughness and grit of this town.”

— Christian Caple, On Montlake