Rickey Smith’s Championship Legacy at Northside
Thirty-one years ago, when Rickey Smith was announced as the new head girls’ basketball coach for Fort Smith Northside, he was taken aback at the number of parents and boosters who sought him seemingly with the same question on all their minds.
“The expectations were very high, but back then, it was just about trying to beat Southside High School,” Rickey says with a chuckle. “When I interviewed, everybody said, ‘Can you beat Southside?’ The first day I had my press conference, multiple parents asked me, ‘Have you seen Southside? What do you think?’
“I put my hand up and said, ‘Just hold it. If y’all hired me just to beat Southside, y’all hired the wrong guy. I’m not from Fort Smith, and I didn’t come here to beat Southside. I came here to try to compete for championships.'”
That statement might have shocked a few die-hards at the time, but in the three decades since, any residual outrage is most certainly gone, as during that time, Northside has not had to settle for achieving one goal at the expense of another. The team put a stamp on a memorable season in 2025, claiming their ninth overall state title in March, all of which have come under Coach Smith, and their third since 2019.
Three Lady Bears scored in double digits against Fayetteville in the finals ― Camryn Schmidt (17 points), Hazley Grotjohn (14 points, five steals), and tourney MVP Erianna Gooden (12 points). The trio was also named to the 6A all-tournament and all-state teams.
The win ended a four-year championship drought for Northside, but the Lady Bears were hardly new faces in the postseason. “I’ve been here thirty-one years, and I know this: Our worst year is the state quarterfinals. That’s the worst year we’ve ever had,” Rickey says. “We’ve been to the state championship fourteen out of thirty-one years.”
It’s also important to note, during his coaching tenure, Northside holds a commanding 52-13 record over crosstown rival Southside, including an incredible thirty-one straight wins for the Lady Bears.
The remarkable consistency of success during that run demonstrates the versatility of play and the willingness of the coaching staff to mold the program around players instead of the other way around. Each era in Lady Bear basketball under Rickey has had a slightly different take – in some years, the team won with suffocating defense; other years, it ran opponents off their feet and burned out the lights on the scoreboard; and still others brought a balance that could hurt you from multiple angles.
“I mean, if I could just handpick how I wanna play, I wanna play fast, I wanna play full court, I wanna play man-to-man, I wanna run and jump, trap and do those things that are really aggressive,” he said. “Well, this year’s team, we didn’t fit that mold very well. I like to average scoring in the high sixties, low seventies, and this year’s team averaged in the mid- to low fifties. We had to figure out a way to play together better.”
The turning point came against a national high school powerhouse team from Oklahoma that clipped the Lady Bears and their dribble-drive offense at the buzzer. Many coaches might have taken solace in keeping it so close against such competition, but for Rickey, the game illustrated the flaws that would have to be corrected come the playoffs. In consultation with his assistants, he did the unthinkable by installing a completely new offense in-season.
“The one thing I think has blessed me over the years, besides having a lot of great assistant coaches, is that I’ve always tried to make the right adjustments to play to our players’ strengths,” he said. “We got back, and we watched the film, and I told my assistants, ‘Hey, look, that’s very similar to what we’re gonna see in the state tournament in Arkansas. We can continue to run the dribble drive and probably win twenty-two, twenty-five basketball games, but we’re gonna struggle when we get to the tournament.’
“I told them, ‘We need to make a decision right now. Are we gonna be happy trying to win twenty or twenty-five games, or are we gonna try to win it all, upset the apple cart, and start all over?’ One of them said, ‘Coach, what do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t coach to win twenty-two, twenty-five ball games. We’re coaching to win it all.’ So that next Monday, we changed our offense.”
Time and experience are critical in moments like that, something Coach had in short supply in his first season, as all new coaches do. Sure, he’d had great success at what was then Stamps High School, a ringer for Hickory High of Hoosier fame if there ever was one. Rickey loved it there so much he resisted overtures to leave initially, and he remembers well the fish-out-of-water feeling in 1994, walking the hallways of Northside, one of the biggest schools in Arkansas.
But the basketball court was home, and the same passion and insistence on excellence that turned Stamps into a contender soon took hold for the first-year Northside coach. The Lady Bears finished 13-1 in conference and advanced to the state semifinals. Though that first team didn’t get to savor a title, they remain so special to him that talking about them brings tears to his eyes.
“My first two teams at Northside High School, they trusted me. They really did,” he said. “They bought in, and they set the culture. When we won our first state championship, every one of those kids reached out to me. I kind of felt a little guilty; I’m not gonna lie to you, because I wanted them to be there, you know what I mean? You wanted the kids that set the tone to be a part of something like that.”
As if sports are not inherently dramatic enough, Coach admits this season was even more emotional than usual for him. In 2021, he lost a good friend and intense rival in Merrill Mankin, former coach at Southside, who lost two state championship games to Rickey but would still later volunteer on the Lady Bears staff until his death. The, last summer, the entire Northside family mourned the passing of longtime Athletic Director Jim Rowland, the man who hired him and perhaps saw something in him others didn’t.
In the aftermath of the Lady Bears’ triumph this spring, Rickey ensured everyone who played a role got their due.
“Coach Mankin, he loved this group as freshmen and he used to tell me, ‘Coach, these freshmen, we’re gonna win a championship with them.’ I’d look at him and say, ‘I hope so,'” Rickey recalls. “Then, when my A.D., Jim, was not doing real well, he said, ‘Coach, win another one.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’
“When we got back in town after the state tournament, my wife was there, and she said, ‘You ready to go eat?’ I said, ‘No, I gotta run an errand first, I’ll meet you at the restaurant.’ I drove to Coach Rowland’s grave, I set the trophy on his grave, and I said, ‘We got one.’ Then I drove across town to Coach Mankin’s grave, I set the trophy on his grave, and again I said, ‘We got one.’ It just felt, like, mission accomplished.”
