Tubby Smith remembers the confrontations between the African-American students and the white students, and how he felt a responsibility “to kind of quell that,” he said.

It was the summer of 1966. St. Mary’s County, Md., had decided to fully integrate its public schools more than a dozen years after the Supreme Court's landmark ruling on desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

A few African-Americans were already attending Great Mills High School, but now hundreds would be bused there. George Washington Carver High, the all-black school Smith attended as a ninth grader, was being shut down.

It was a time of “turmoil,” according to former Great Mills basketball coach Gene Wood, and “most of it was not within the school. It was within the community.”

Smith equated the situation to the movie, “Remember the Titans.”

Being a standout athlete, he had been chosen to participate in a committee with students of every race to help smooth things over during the transition. There were meetings and long discussions about how to improve race relations throughout the area. They listened to one another’s concerns.

But Smith wouldn’t be able to digest what it all meant, or how it would help him win 576 career games and a national championship on the basketball court, for decades.

“You learn how to communicate with people, how you present yourself,” Smith explained earlier this week. “This all shaped who I am with me not even understanding and appreciating it until later on. Until now. Until you start to talk about it.”

Calkins:Is Tubby Smith the answer for Memphis basketball?

Smith opens his second season as the coach at Memphis just 80 miles from where he grew up in Scotland, Md. The Tigers face No. 25 Alabama on Friday night at the Naval Academy as part of the Veterans Classic, and it will be just the second college game Smith has coached in Maryland during his 27-year head coaching career.

Returning home, however, is also a reminder of the lessons that still resonate with him, as he tries to build up a team full of new faces following an offseason dominated by player defections and a polarized fan base.

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How a large family led to patience

Tubby Smith can’t remember the address of the farm Guffrie and Parthenia Smith raised 17 children on because he didn’t have to ever learn it.

Their house was located on Fresh Pond Neck Road, right near where the Potomac and Patuxent Rivers empty into the Chesapeake Bay, and “we just had a little route and we picked stuff up at the post office,” Smith said.

But hardly a day goes by that Smith won’t recount a saying doled out by his father, who died in 2009. Just go listen to one of his speeches to Memphis area civic groups over the past few months for proof.

Guffrie Smith was a World War II veteran and earned a Purple Heart for his service in the Army, which is why Tubby Smith couldn’t pass up the chance to participate in Friday’s event.

But Guffrie was also a school bus driver, farmer, owner of a local barber shop and worked at the nearby Naval Air Station. That work ethic filtered down to Tubby Smith, the sixth oldest among his siblings. Chores were to be done before sports could be played, and so Smith often found himself feeding the hogs or killing a chicken or harvesting the crops.

He relates all this to basketball now, particularly because the Tigers will feature eight new scholarship players this season.

“When you have to grow everything you eat, you’re patient. You have to cultivate that garden or you watch the hogs and chickens grow,” he said last month.

“In this line of work — coaching and teaching — you can’t rush players. That’s what I try to help players understand, help fans understand, help parents understand, and I have to understand that it’s not going to happen overnight. Yes, they’re talented enough to be on the team. But it’s helped me look at just that it’s not all or nothing.”

How Smith thrived despite racial tensions

These days, however, the house Smith grew up in is nowhere to be found. It burned down years ago and, in many ways, the Scotland he knew is gone, too. The small farming town expanded into a suburb as the population in southern Maryland exploded over the past decade. What were once sleepy two-lane roads have been turned into major highways.

As Wood put it, he used to need 10 minutes to drive from his home to Great Mills because there were only two stoplights along the way. Nowadays, it takes 40 minutes and 14 stoplights because of the traffic.

But Smith’s legacy lives on there.

He scored more than 1,000 points over three seasons on the basketball team at Great Mills. They ran an offense called the “Oklahoma Shuffle” and Smith was the focal point. Along the way, he became a unifying symbol within the school .

O’Day Smith, one of Tubby’s younger brothers, recalls his brother being a star in the community. And yet, he couldn't attend some of Smith's away games “because there were some places he’d go we couldn’t go to because they’d want to fight,” he said. “It was still blacks against whites.”

One game against rival Chopticon, Wood recalled, had to be finished with nobody in the stands after fights kept breaking out.

But the poise that has since become a trademark of Smith’s coaching had already begun to shine through.

“I didn’t know a whole lot, but I knew I had something special in Tubby,” Wood said. “Growing up in the time that he grew up, that probably had a lot to do with him being able to tolerate things. I think having a large family probably helped because you’ve got to learn to get along with each other.”

Why coaching high school was 'as tough as it gets'

Tubby Smith remembers the circumstances that led to the start of his coaching career well.

Smith was home for the summer in 1973 after recently graduating from High Point College, where he was one of four African-Americans on the entire campus. He considered enrolling in the Air Force. But then the Great Mills principal and the superintendent of schools in St. Mary’s County called.

Great Mills needed a varsity basketball coach, and so he accepted the job.

“I was like, ‘Wow, man, my brother is going to coach,’ ” said O’Day Smith, who is eight years younger than Tubby. “Then, I was like, ‘Wow, it’s gonna be rough.’ Reality set in that my brother was going to coach me. Sometimes, I thought it was an omen or something, that he came back to harass me.”

These were humble beginnings, though. Tubby Smith taught and coached at Great Mills. His wife, Donna, worked at a local water treatment facility. They lived in a trailer.

But O’Day Smith didn’t make the varsity team until his junior year and Tubby Smith still laughs about the suspension he doled out to O’Day to show everyone else he wouldn’t play favorites.

“When you first get out of college, you have these aspirations and he put a lot of pressure on players, especially me. There wasn’t no nepotism. That’s for sure,” O’Day Smith said. “But I knew he was going to be good and he knew what he was doing because he lived and breathed basketball. He just wanted it done right and he wanted it done his way. If you do it his way, and it takes you awhile to learn that, it’ll work if you just do it the way he says to do it.”

Tubby Smith called the experience of coaching his brother, a cousin and several family friends at Great Mills “as tough as it gets,” although he also credits it with providing a template for how to handle coaching his sons at Georgia and Kentucky years later.

Great Mills made it to two state tournaments during Tubby Smith’s four seasons, but O’Day said his teams never lived up to their potential. The players never completely bought into the unselfishness his brother preached.

Despite that, Tubby Smith said the underlying principles of fundamentals and discipline that he tried to instill as a high school coach in Maryland haven’t changed much today.

The challenges he faced and confronted years ago are part of the reputation he ultimately forged at the highest levels of college basketball.

“The history that he’s made is amazing,” O’Day Smith said. “It’s just great that he could do that coming from where he came from. A lot of times people are groomed to do that type of thing, and that’s the way they lived the whole way. But he didn’t live to do what he did.”