Sometimes it’s not easy for a great athlete to make the transition from the playing field to coaching ranks. Magic Johnson (5-11 in his brief stint with the Los Angeles Lakers), Elgin Baylor (86-135 with the New Orleans Jazz), Isiah Thomas (56-108 in two seasons with the Knicks) and Wayne Gretzky (143-161-24 with the Phoenix Coyotes) are among the graveyard of great players who struggled to transfer their skills to the coaching field. John Smith believes his sister Katie has the right stuff to become a great coach. The legendary point guard/small forward will be making her debut as an assistant coach for the New York Liberty in the WNBA this spring. “Katie’s always been a student of the game,” says John, a football coach at Bexley High School. “She has always understood not just what she’s supposed to be doing but what everyone is supposed to be doing around her. She’s almost been a coach her entire life.” Katie, the all-time leading scorer in women’s professional basketball with 7,885 career points in 17 years of playing in the ABL and WNBA leagues, seems to be stepping right off the court and onto the bench with the Liberty. She spent her final season in New York, playing for her former Detroit Shock coach Bill Laimbeer. Before last season began, Katie discussed the possibility of coaching with Laimbeer.“I kind of knew that (coaching) was going to be the next step,” says Katie, who is finishing up graduate school at Ohio State before joining the team. “I want to get my feet wet. Even though I’ve been a graduate assistant at Ohio State, this will be the first time I’ll really be involved with the coaching and seeing what they do.” “We’re thrilled to have Katie join the Liberty coaching staff next season,” Laimbeer says in a press release. “Katie’s leadership and toughness, as well as her discipline for the game, will be invaluable to our entire team.” Katie couldn’t come up with an answer when asked what one thing she learned from Laimbeer, who was part of the Detroit Pistons teams that won back-to-back NBA titles during the 1988-89 and 89-90 seasons. “He has a great offensive mind,” Katie says. “He’s very open and very direct. You appreciate that as a player. Sometimes you may not agree with everything wholeheartedly but at least you know what he’s thinking and what he wants.” Winning two WNBA titles and being one of the league’s all-time leading scorers would make most people’s careers. For Katie, it’s just a paragraph on her Wikipedia page. Katie has succeeded on every level, making it to the Division I state championship in high school and to the NCAA national championship game at the collegiate level, winning three gold medals in the Olympics and capturing the only two championships in the now defunct ABL. “Oh that’s hard,” Katie says when asked to name the apex of her career. “I’ve had a lot of great experiences. Some were positive because you won; other times you might not have won anything but you learned a lot.” THE VERY BEGINNING In order to understand Katie’s journey, one has to go back to Logan, Ohio where she was the only daughter of Barbara and John Smith. She was born into a family of athletes. Her father earned three letters in football at Ohio University. Her younger brother Tom also played football and track at Ohio, winning the Mid-American Conference discus championship in 1996. John, her older brother, was a center on the 1993 Division III national championship football team at Mount Union. Going against her brothers and playing on an otherwise all-boys basketball teams built a drive in Katie. “Competitiveness comes from who you were around but some people have that drive as part of their personality,” she says. “I have a little bit of both.” Even when Katie was younger, John could sense there was something unique about his sister. Whether she was in season or out of season, she would go out and jump rope for hours and do drills to improve her game. “She’s relentless in whatever she is trying to accomplish,” John says. “I think about all the things she did when no one was looking. She had the determination to want to be the best. I’m just in awe of that.” In high school, Katie took the Logan High School girls basketball team to new heights. Katie scored 2,740 career points, the fifth most according to the OHSAA’s unofficial record book. During the 1990-91 season, Katie’s junior year, the Chieftains lost to Canfield 61-60 in a Division I state semifinal. Her senior year, Logan finished 25-3 overall, losing to Pickerington 53-46 in the 1992 state championship game. Katie was named as the Gatorade National Player of the Year her senior year and earned MVP honors in the inaugural WBCA High School All-America game in 1992. THE BUCKEYE YEARS No one knew what kind of impact Katie would have on Ohio State. Before she arrived on campus, the Buckeyes struggled to a 15-13 finish overall during the 1991-92 season. Katie had an immediate effect as the Buckeyes went 28-4 and tied for first in the Big Ten. After pounding Rutgers 91-60 and Western Kentucky 86-73 in the opening rounds of the NCAA tournament, Ohio State squeaked past Virginia 75-73 and Iowa 73-72 in overtime to advance to the finals against Texas Tech. The final pitted Katie against the Red Raiders’ Sheryl Swoopes, a dominant player in the WNBA. Smith scored 28 points in that game but Ohio State couldn’t stop Swoopes who scored a championship game record 47 points as the Red Raiders won 84-82.“(I remember telling Sheryl years later) if we could’ve held you to 44, we would’ve been all right,” Katie says. That game was the closest the Ohio State women’s team came to winning a championship during Katie’s tenure. Her sophomore and junior years, the Buckeyes were a combined 31-27 overall and failed to make the NCAA tournament. Her senior year Ohio State finished 21-13 after losing to eventual national champion Tennessee 97-65 in the second round. “I learned a lot from that,” Katie says. “It made me realize that nothing is promised. How well you do one year doesn’t mean you will ever get back.” Although the Buckeyes never made it back to the Final Four, Katie carved out a name for herself. She is the school’s all-time leading scorer and ranks second in the conference with 2,578 points. In 2001, she became the first women’s basketball player at Ohio State to have her jersey retired. “I enjoyed my whole time at Ohio State, not just the basketball part but being a part of something bigger,” says Smith, who still lives in Columbus. “I really connected with the university.” PLAYING FOR PAY When Katie graduated in 1996, the ABL and WNBA were both getting their start. She opted for the ABL partly because Columbus had a team in the Quest. And at first she felt like she made the right choice. The Quest finished 31-9 during the 1996-97 season, defeating the Richmond Rage 3-2 in a best-of-five game series to win the ABL’s inaugural season and went 36-8 during the 1997-98 season, defeating the Long Beach Stingrays 3-2 to claim their second title.Midway through the 1997-98 season, the bottom fell out of the ABL. The Quest looked like they were headed for a third consecutive Eastern Conference title, winning 11 of their first 14 games. Then, shortly before Christmas, Katie found out from a reporter the Quest and the ABL had folded, leaving her without a job.“It wasn’t like ‘Oh my gosh! I didn’t see this coming,’” says Katie, who scored 1,433 points in her two and a half years with Columbus. “We knew going into that third year the league wasn’t going to make it. “The great thing was the WNBA was still doing well.” Katie followed Quest coach Brian Agler and teammates Tonya Edwards, Sonja Tate, Andrea Lloyd-Curry, Angie Potthoff and Shanele Stires to the Minnesota Lynx, an expansion team. Katie still holds Lynx records for most three-point field goals made (460), three-point field goals attempted (1,239), free-throws made (891), free-throws attempted (1,039), and minutes (7,287) and is second in career points (3,605) and scoring average (17.6) behind Seimone Augustus (4,188 and 18.7 respectively). The point guard was then traded to Detroit before the 2005-06 season. In her first season, she averaged 11.7 points and 3.3 assists as the Shock defeated the Sacramento Monarchs 3-2 in a five-game series to win the WNBA title. She helped engineer a second title run during the 2007-08 season, averaging 14.7 points and 4.0 assists. She was named as the Finals MVP as the Shock swept the San Antonio Silver Stars 3-0. After the Shock moved from Detroit to Tulsa after the 2008-09 season, Katie became a free agent and signed with the Washington Mystics and then a year later, was reunited with Agler with the Seattle Storm for the 2010-11 season. She closed out her career with Laimbeer and the Liberty. She is second in the WNBA’s career points with 6,452 points behind Tina Thompson (7,488). Add in her Quest point totals and she is the all-time leading scorer with 7,885. Katie went from being the focal point of a team to being a role player toward the tail end of her career. Katie believes her variety of experiences will help her as she begins the next phase of her career. “As you get older, you look at things differently,” Katie says. “Your prospective of the whole thing becomes ‘How do I contribute and how do I make our team better.’ You had your journey. Now you just want others to have the best experience they can have and help them become the best player they can be.”