By Tanisha Naik
“What isn’t new?” That’s what Coach Everett said when I asked him about his new job. But some of the big changes: Everrett Smulders was previously a community coach for the Lovett Cross Country Team and is now the head coach and the athletics administrative assistant here at Lovett. He attended Lovett himself as a student, graduating in 2011.
Obviously, being a community coach is extremely different from being a head coach. One thing Coach Everett is learning this year is all the behind-the-scenes work that the head coach has to do just to be able to run a practice. There’s one half of it coaching the kids and another half of making sure they know when practice is, having uniforms, entering in meets, and making sure their parents are all on the same page,” he said. The XC team has 8 different workout groups that all do specifically tailored workouts for their fitness levels.
As a community coach, Everett could just show up and try to be inspiring and run with people but now he has more of an administrative role and he has the ultimate say in terms of decisions.
While Coach Everett loves to run, he hasn’t always. During his freshman year at Lovett, he was always the kid who was at the back of the group during cardio day at PE and Coach Muschamp always had to yell at him.
During his sophomore year, however, his mom bribed him to join the XC team. ”I figured that I would be better off putting in my best effort instead of wasting my time,” he said. “I realized I was good at something and after working at it for a while I fell in love with that feeling.”
And his hard work really paid off. He ran a 3:58 mile in college at Ole Miss making him the 30th person to accomplish this. And if you think that is impressive, not too long ago he ran 100 miles straight through in 18.5 hours at a 9:30 pace.
Coach Everett most certainly didn’t expect to be back at Lovett. Everett has been part of the Lovett family since 2011, when he joined in sixth grade, transferring from Pace. His impression was that it was a very athletics-oriented school. “I felt like I could find my group of people at Lovett rather than Pace,” he said, “and I think Lovett has a beautiful campus and has one of the coolest tracks in America with the river next to it.”
Now that Everett is a head coach he has many hopes for the athletes and himself. He wants them to experience not just the highs, but also the lows that come from committing yourself to something so fully. He hopes to see people grow physically and mentally, to learn the lessons through running consistently, and to grasp how hard work pays off. “Running’s a sport where what you put in is what you get out on race day. It’s not so much like basketball where you have skills or height/weight, but I really hope that the athletes can learn a lot about themselves through running,” he said.
During his time as a student here, Everett had teachers who made lasting impressions on him. He talked about Ms. Waterman as one of the coolest people ever. “You could just hang in her room and have a conversation with her but she also cares about the learning a lot and I didn’t feel any pressure of having to perform to a certain level academically, but there’s a good balance to where the students were still engaged in learning,” he said. He also mentioned Coach Muschamp, saying that although Coach Muschamp was hard on him–and perhaps because of it “I respected his opinion a lot and what he had to say.”
Aside from running, over the summer Everett got married, and bought a house. Coach Everett also owns his own personal business called “WesFly Athletics,” which is a private coaching business as well as a clothing store and media company.
The first part of the company “Wes” is actually his initials: William Everett Smulders, and “Fly” carries a double meaning because you fly when you’re running but it’s also a slang word for cool.
“I have always thought in terms of business and value and I kind of just wanted a way to monetize any endeavors that I would like to go into,” Coach Everett explained. In this way, if he wanted to open a real estate firm he could call it WestFly Real Estate, or an investment firm he could call it WesFly Investment.
Coach Everett enjoys watching Breaking Bad, Bloodline, and any realistic television, and when he’s on his multiple-mile long runs he loves listening to YouTube, and podcasts that vary from self-improvement to crazy stories about the Amazon jungle.
Much of his summer was spent working here at Lovett. So far he loves his job and his passion was evident when talking to him. He told Athletics Director Adam Nelson that he would take any position at Lovett as long as he could coach.
He feels extremely blessed to be in this position. “I’m not chasing any sort of status that people try to get when they get a job pressure to do this and that,” he said. “I’m just doing what I feel like I’m being called to do.”
As the interview came to an end, I asked him where he was going next. He said he had to shoot off a lot of emails to make sure the buses were ready for the XC meet, shoot off more emails about uniforms, and then get a good sleep for the first meet of the season. “Super excited about that,” he said.
