EDGARD — After more than 40 years as a teacher and coach on the West Bank of St. John the Baptist Parish, Lester Smith is ready to retire.

Maybe.

Well, not really.

“I’ve got one foot in and one foot out,” he said. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

Before the 2015-16 girls basketball season, the longtime coach of the West St. John High girls basketball team sort of hinted that it might be his last. When the stellar Maya Trench graduated, Smith said, he might follow her out.

Trench graduated in May. Smith still hasn’t typed his resignation letter.

For the record, no one is pushing Smith out the door at West St. John, where he has coached football and basketball for the last four decades, nor at Fifth Ward Elementary, where he teaches P.E.

It’s just that, at the tender age of 70 and with a new hip, Smith is starting to think it might be time to hang up that whistle of his.

Maybe.

According to his wife, Janice, he’s been saying “this year” for the last several years.

Then one of the players says, “You can’t leave yet! What about me?” and he stays.

“I keep thinking one more, one more,” Smith said.

What’s one more?

He started teaching in 1970, returning after his graduation from Southern University to his hometown of Edgard. In 1974 he got his first team, coaching the seventh and eighth grade boys at what was then Edgard Elementary School.

His team could only practice during the lunch period. The problem was, four days out of five, Smith had lunch duty.

“I’d tell the captain, ‘These are the drills I want you to run,’” he said. “They’d go in the gym and practice while I had duty.”

At West St. John since the 1980s, he’s only outlasted five football coaches. He was there for the good times, and the bad. The three trips to the Superdome with the Rams of 1992, 1993 and 1994.

“We were the Buffalo Bills of high school football,” he said. “But we put West St. John and Edgard on the map.”

He was there for the game at Logansport in 1985 or 86 when “it rained and rained and rained and rained.”

“We were so wet, we went to a hotel after to dry off and change clothes,” Smith recalled. The Rams won that one 8-6.

They lost the semifinal at Many, though, the one Smith calls one of the toughest of his career.

“We were supposed to win it,” he said. “It was cold and they just jumped on us 20-0.”

It was such a tough loss, Smith took his wife for a day trip to Baton Rouge the next morning.
“I had to leave town,” he said.

He was there throughout the days when Riverside Academy was the team’s biggest rival, when fans from each side would crowd onto the ferry to get to the game then tailgate together in the parking lots.

“There never was any trouble,” he said. “It was all black versus all white, public school versus private school. Nothing ever happened. The kids on the field, they just want to compete.”

He also was there to see the great Terry Robiskie and players like Antoine Edwards, Henry Jackson, Sheldon Cannon, Adair Alexander, Ira Jackson, Tyson Jackson, Quinn Johnson and the late Juan Joseph.

In the late 80s, Smith made the switch from boys basketball to girls, leading the team to too many district championships to count and one state runner-up finish in 2013.

Those Lady Rams finished 32-2.

“I’m proud of it,” Smith said of his team’s runner-up trophy. “It was a good year. We lost by 2. There’s not much you can say about losing by 2.”

He then rattles off the names of the outstanding ladies he coached on the court, Kim and Goldie Butler, Jaylyn Gordon, Jada Fifi, Tricia Gaudet and Trench.

There will be more outstanding players. That Smith knows.

So maybe he’s not quite done yet.

And if he did retire, what in the heck would he do?

He would umpire and referee recreation and middle school games, as he has done for the past 40 years “just for fun.”

“I don’t know anything else,” Smith said. “My whole life has been around sports. “It’s about making an impact on so many lives.

“You stop to eat and some of the kids don’t have any money for food. You’re not going to let them go hungry.

“So many times people come up to me and say, ‘You coached my dad’ or ‘you refereed my game when I was 7.’ People remember that.”

How could they forget?