For more than four decades (give or take, with an ill-advised detour into temporary retirement), Ronnie Williams has been on the bench, alongside the track or riding a golf cart, coaching generations of middle and high school athletes in Fort Smith and Greenwood. Along the way, he’s assembled stories from the sidelines enough to fill volumes.
“So many things in my life, to me, are godsends,” Ronnie says. “I’m a strong Christian and I’m not ashamed to say it. God has brought me so many things.”
There’s the one about the principal at his first school job, a nun, known for giving him a stern side-eye over his antics. Or how in his early days as a football coach, he wasn’t above strapping on a helmet and running the ball himself during practice.
Like any coach with a career as long, there are losses that haunt him still. The basketball championship tilt where his team dropped their only game of the season; that one hurt so much he left the second-place trophy sitting in the opposing gym.
“We were 27-0 going into the last game and we lost. We lost to County Line. Bill Gossage beat me that year,” Ronnie says, the memory thorny to this day. “It was devastating.”
But there’s also the incredible runs of success and streaks of domination. The Trinity girls’ team that won sixty-eight basketball games in a row. The football program that won twelve league titles and eighty percent of its games, that once won thirty-eight consecutive contests and included one squad that ran the field with just twenty-two players. Finally, his peer schools couldn’t take it anymore.
“We got kicked out of our conference in 2005,” Ronnie says, incredulity rising in his tone. “I asked them, ‘Why are y’all kicking us out?’ They said, ‘We’re tired of you winning. We’re tired of playing you.’ I said, ‘What am I going to do?’ They said, ‘We don’t care.’”
But what’s more amazing is the number of people who have stories about him, former students, colleagues, and parents who tell of how Ronnie influenced their lives for the better, from the front of the classroom or from the opposing sideline.
“I attended Trinity – it was actually Immaculate Conception at the time – and Coach Ronnie was my ninth-grade civics teacher,” says Dr. Karen Hollenbeck, principal of Trinity Junior High in Fort Smith.
“I always remember he started every class with a devotional, which of course is not uncommon in Catholic schools. He’s always been such an example of Christian leadership. I receive copies of the texts that he sends out to his athletes today, ‘Make sure you go to church this weekend. Make sure you’re reading your devotional.’ That’s just how he lives his life.”
Ronnie Williams grew up in Greenwood, attended public schools and played any sport that was in season. Basketball was his favorite and he’d play anytime he could – be it practice, a pickup game at the Baptist church parking lot or close-in competitions in the Williams’ backyard.
“My dad built me a concrete slab in the backyard and put a basketball goal up for me,” he says. “I look at it now, and it’s just a little bitty piece of concrete. But back then it was a big ol’ piece of concrete. We had a lot of games on it.”
In addition to school, extracurriculars and part-time jobs for spending money, Ronnie also started volunteer coaching pee wee baseball and basketball teams. At the time he just found it fun, but it was actually mining something much deeper within him.
“I loved sports, but the thing that pulled me was working with those young kids,” he says.
After attending Westark Community College (now University of Arkansas Fort Smith) he earned his teaching and coaching credentials from Arkansas Tech University in Russellville. A pal offered him a coaching job at Immaculate Conception School in Fort Smith. It was 1980, and the tiny Catholic school – which would eventually grow into Trinity Junior High School – would be his home for the next twenty-six years.
“It was a learning experience,” he says. “They don’t teach you a lot in college on how to mop a gym floor, how to clean the bathroom and those types of things. They don’t really teach you a lot about how to handle parents and how to handle certain situations with kids. It was fun learning and all, but they don’t teach you enough stuff to prepare you for the real world of coaching.”
Ronnie proved a quick study and he had to be, considering he either head or assistant coached nearly every sport the parochial school offered. Along the way, he found as much opportunity to develop character in his players as he did to build a coaching résumé.
But by 2006, still smarting from being expelled from the league for being too dominant, he looked around at other options, landing at his alma mater at Greenwood. For the next thirteen years, he made the seventh, eighth and ninth-grade girls’ basketball programs, seventh grade track team and high school boys’ and girls’ golf teams instant contenders in their respective leagues and, in golf’s case, in the state as well. Under his direction, his girls won five state titles while his boys won one and gave him his only overall state medalist.
And, in January 2019, he reached a pinnacle few coaches at any level do, as his girls landed him career basketball win number 1,000 against Van Buren.
“You think about milestones that are unbreakable,” says Dustin Smith, Greenwood athletic director. “It’s hard to coach a thousand games, let alone win a thousand. I don’t know that people will really appreciate what a thousand wins really is, because that’s so hard to do. But that’s a testament to the level of success that his teams have had.”
The total is all the more impressive because it came as Ronnie was battling a bigger opponent than had ever stepped foot on the field or court against him. In 2013, he was diagnosed with cancer in his tailbone. Surgery was thought to have caught it all, but in 2015 it was back, prompting thirty rounds of radiation. That bought him two more years before the cancer again returned.
After narrowly avoiding more surgery, he’s managed the condition with medications. But the combination of surgery and radiation destroyed skin, causing a quarter-sized hole to open on his back that required an operation to repair. And it was then Fort Smith saw the chance to give back to the man who had given so much over the years. Friends organized a fund drive to help defray medical expenses, eventually collecting in excess of $25,000, to say nothing of the countless prayers from the community.
“It’s just awesome to see your old players, your old parents, people you don’t even know, people from your church, people from your town give like that,” he says. “My wife and I both just sat there and cried that there’s so many people who were willing to help.”
Ronnie could have ridden off into the sunset after this last procedure and no one would have blamed him. That he has returned to the Trinity sidelines as its basketball coach comes as a surprise to no one, either.
“I retired in 2019 and sat out. Didn’t like it,” he says. “The difference I’ve found in the private school versus the public school was, when I was at Trinity I knew every parent, every kid, every kid’s brother or sister. We were just family. Then when I got to public school, I never got to know very many. I knew the kids I coached, I knew some of the golf parents and stuff, but I didn’t get to know near as many people. I missed that part of it.
“So, last year I went back to Trinity. It’s kind of been a cycle, you know, I was there and now I’m back. I plan on working there maybe this year and two more. At some point in time, I’ve got to get out and see the world, do some things while I can.”
No matter how many more years the beloved coach stays on the bench, he’ll have already left a mark that is impossible to erase from two athletic programs, leaving both much better than he found them.
“What stands out about Ronnie is his faith, number one. His integrity, second. He is one of those guys if he tells you he’s going to do something, he’s going to do it,” Dustin Smith says. “And I always say this about him: If you can’t get along with Ronnie Williams, it’s not Ronnie’s fault. You go look in the mirror if you can’t get along with him, because that’s where the problem lies.”
