Back at It
Warren Smith has enjoyed a successful football career as a player and assistant coach. He feels that both will help him greatly as he enters his first season as a head football coach.
Smith, a 2008 graduate of Lacey and a 2012 University of Maine graduate, was recently named the new head football coach at Absegami.
He hopes to bring stability to a program that will now have its third head coach in three seasons. Smith replaced Lamont Robinson, who went 5-5 last season in his lone year as the Braves head coach.
During the past 12 years he was an assistant at Lacey under veteran head coach Lou Vircillo.
“I am excited,” Smith said in a phone interview. “I learned a lot under coach Vircillo, one of the all-time greats.”
He said everything aligned for this first chance to run his own program.
“It was time. I am 34, about to be 35 and wanted to call a program my own and do it my way,” he said.
In addition to coaching, Smith was a quarterback at Lacey, Maine and then in the Arena Football League.
The Arena League schedules were usually played in the spring and summer, and it worked well with both his coaching and teaching schedules. Smith has been a health and physical education teacher at Lacey for 12 years.
As a junior in high school in 2006—where he played quarterback and defensive back—Smith was part of a South Jersey Group 3 championship at Lacey. He helped lead Lacey to a 12-0 record that concluded with a 12-0 victory over Seneca in the South Jersey Group 3 championship.
During his high school career, he was an All-Shore Conference honoree on both offense and defense.
After high school he attended Iona for one season, which at the time was a 1-AA (now called FCS) independent. After that season, Iona folded its football program and Smith was recruited by Maine. As luck had it, Maine’s quarterback had transferred, so he was offered a full scholarship and ended up starting three seasons at quarterback. As a senior in the 2011 season, he guided Maine to the final 8 of the 1-AA playoffs.
He was a second team all-Colonial Athletic Association (now called Coastal Athletic Association) his senior year.
Counting his year at Iona, he threw for 8,025 career yards. During his senior year at Maine, Smith passed for 3,122 yards and 22 touchdowns. That is the second highest number of yards for a single season in school history. The 22 touchdown passes are tied for the fifth highest in a single-season. .
After graduation, he played one season in Germany and then embarked on a 12-year Arena Football League career that ended in 2022 with the Albany Empire.
He was a two-time champion, with the Washington Valor in 2018 and with Albany in 2022. Both titles came in the Arena Football League.
Smith was also a two-time MVP with the Lehigh Valley Steelhawks in 2017 and the Trenton Freedom in 2014, both in the National Arena League (NAL).
And now with all of his experience as a player and assistant coach, Smith is raring to go. The Braves’ offseason workouts have already begun. There are so many responsibilities that he is tackling one day at a time. Most off, he wants to build the program from the ground up.
“I want to get into the middle school and the youth (football) community,” he said. “I want to be at this job for a long time and it’s so exciting to be part of this.”
Photo Courtesy of Warren Smith
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Author: Marc Narducci
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