In grief, St. Paul coaching legend reflects on Hall of Fame career

As a Hall of Fame coach for nearly three decades, Floyd Smaller taught his players how to rise up after getting knocked down, how to find victory in the midst of adversity.

This year is putting the teacher to the test.

Smaller, who learned in January that he'd been chosen for the 2022 National High School Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame, was incapacitated with COVID-19 at the time. He would be dealt a harsher blow soon after.

Lorraine Smaller, a beloved north Minneapolis educator and Coach Smaller's wife of 60 years, died Feb. 15 of heart disease. COVID also played a role, her husband said. Because of COVID, he wasn't able to see her before she died.

Smaller, 85, his deep voice softer but still resonant, admits to a push and pull of emotions. His heart is broken by loss at the same time it's warmed by peers and players recognizing a lifetime shaping student-athletes.

After growing up in the Rondo neighborhood, Smaller started coaching after graduating college in Arkansas. He began his Minnesota high school coaching career at St. Paul's Mechanic Arts High School in 1972. He retired after 26 years at St. Paul Central High School in 2000.

Full disclosure: I'm one of his former players. I played football at Central in 1979, 1980 and 1981. After he called to share details of this bittersweet year, Eye On St. Paul sat down with the coach to check in. This interview was edited for length.

Q: When did you find out about the national coaching Hall of Fame?

A: In January, while I was sick [with COVID]. I was struggling to read [the letter].

Q: Was this at the same time your wife was ill?

A: She'd been in a nursing home for five-and-a-half months, right before we moved her home. She had heart disease and my son Santee had spent a year and 10 months trying to keep a wife, mother and grandmother alive.

[Lorraine and I] would listen to music together, Aretha Franklin and Sarah Vaughan and all that good jazz. And we'd go back and remember what we were doing at that time. I talked to her on the phone on Valentine's Day, she could hear me, but she couldn't speak.

My wife died while I was sick. We lost a beautiful person we all loved very much — and me most of all, after 60 years of marriage.

Q: You wrote in a letter that this year has been bad and good. What's the good?

A: The funeral was exceptionally well-organized, and we kept people safe. We used Zoom. We had 65 people at the Estes Funeral Home during the funeral and we had 12,200 people around the country who tuned in to watch and listen.

[Smaller mentioned several planned tributes to Lorraine, including possibly renaming Falwell Park, where she taught children, in her honor.]

And there's the hall of fame.

Q: You were named to the Minnesota State High School League Hall of Fame in 1995, the Minnesota High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame last fall and now the national coaching honor. Why do you think you were chosen?

A: Part of it was won-loss record. Part of it was all the kids [I coached] who went to college. The other part was a lifetime coaching all three sports [football, basketball and track]. A lifetime of production. It wasn't just winning in one sport. There is so much more to coaching than the record itself.

[As we talked, Marvin Bond, a former basketball and football player at St. Paul Central, came up to visit with his old coach. Bond recalled a sophomore basketball game in which Central was winning at halftime, but instead of going to the locker room, Smaller made the team run sprints. He was unhappy with their effort. Motivated, Central won going away.]

Q: Marvin said the players weren't angry at you. They just didn't want to disappoint you.

A: I didn't want to disappoint you. I would have disappointed you if I had been slack in my job.

Q: Do you hear from your former players a lot?

A: Yes. It makes me happy to sit here in my old age and hear all this coming back. It feels good.

Q: Marvin also said you treated star players the same as back-ups. Why was that?

A: You're coaching for the family, and everybody in that family is important. First-string and third-string, we had high expectations.

I never did anything better than see a kid who could hardly walk and chew bubble gum who later was doing things he thought he couldn't. Then you know you're coaching. Then you know you're teaching.

Q: Do these memories help you get through what you're dealing with now?

A: I don't know. It's hard. She's gone. And it just gets worse when I realize she's not on a vacation. She's not coming back. There's another place out there I know where I can see her again.

There is so much happening in my life this year, I felt I had to do something, say something.

But I keep good memories of her. You don't think about the bad stuff.