Hampton Athletics Hall of Fame
The fifth individual to serve in the role of head football coach at Hampton, Gideon Smith held the position for two decades, longer than any other head football coach in the history of the program. He also compiled an impressive won-lost record of 97-46-12, the most victories amassed by any coach in the first 90 years of Pirate football.
Smith’s tenure as Hampton’s head football coach saw the program capture its first black college national championship, that coming with a 5-1 record in just his second year as head coach in 1922. That 5-1 mark was the beginning of an eight-year span in which the team lost no more than two games in any season. In those eight years, the team won over 80 percent of its games, going 39-8-4. Following the national championship season, the Pirates went on to win four more conference championships.
A 1916 graduate of Michigan State where he played collegiately, Smith was one of the first two African-Americans in the country to play college football and one of the first to play professional football. In his brief but successful pro career, Smith played alongside the legendary Jim Thorpe with the Canton Bulldogs and played an integral part of the team’s success.
After serving in World War I, it was then that Smith journeyed to Virginia and to Hampton Institute, where he not only served as the head football coach, but he served as a professor of physical education as well. Even after his coaching career at HI concluded in 1942, he continued to excel as a professor and assistant athletics director until his retirement in 1955. Thirteen years later, he died at the age of 78.
In 1992, Smith was inducted into the Michigan State Athletics Hall of Fame, being tabbed as a “Warrior of his time.”
