Eugene “Doc” Smith served as head athletic trainer at Memphis State University for 19 years before his death. A native of Kingman, Kansas, he attended Sterling College where he received his B.S. degree in 1949. While an undergraduate at Sterling College he lettered in Football, basketball and track. From there he obtained his Master’s degree in athletic training from Indiana University in 1954. However, following graduation from Sterling, Smith taught and was assistant coach at Bazine, Kansas High School for four years. In 1954 he returned to the coaching profession serving one year as assistant coach at Great Bend, Kansas High School. His first full time job as an athletic trainer was at Piao Duro High School in Amarillo, Texas, where he stayed five years before coming to Memphis State in 1960, as head athletic trainer and professor in the physical education department.
On the national level, “Doc” Smith was an active member of the NATA serving as a board member from District IX from 1973 to 1976. He chaired the organization’s national convention in St. Louis. In addition, he was selected as the athletic trainer for the American All-Stars, and toured China in the summer of 1974.
Lone time MSU football coach and athletic director Billy “Spook” Murphy remembered that “If Doc said they couldn’t play, they didn’t play. But he could get players well and ready to go better than anybody I ever saw. He made you want to get well and play. He was the finest athletic trainer I’ve ever run into …one of the most thorough people I’ve ever dealt with.”
Gene was only 52 when he died in November, 1979 of pancreatic cancer. Not long before that he had been inducted into the Memphis State University Athletic Hall of Fame, and at his death the Doc Smith Scholarship Fund for Student Athletic Trainers was established in his memory.
Eddie Cantler was Gene’s assistant and succeeded him as Memphis State’s (now the University of Memphis) head athletic trainer. As Eddie remembers him today “Gene was hardnosed and of the old school. He was very deliberated in action, but one of the most caring people I’ve ever known. As I sit and notice some of his mannerisms that I picked up. I realize how much of an effect he had on me. In this day and age of technology, when I run into roadblocks I go back to his way of doing things and get results.”
Gene was a driving force in the early days of trying to get state legislation past to certify athletic trainers. He was inducted into the Tennessee Athletic Trainers’ Society Hall of Fame in 1995, and SEATA’s Hall of Fame in 2009. TATS named their College Athletic trainer Award the Eugene Smith/Mickey O’Brien College Athletic Trainer of the year in honor of him and University of Tennessee athletic trainer Mickey O’Brien .