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For Rashid Smith, coaching basketball and teaching mathematics come from the same place: breaking complex ideas into something players and students can understand -— and helping them see where it all leads

By Kathy Routliffe

Short stories. Basketball coaching. Middle and upper school mathematics. As far as Rashid Smith is concerned, there is a through line connecting all three.
“I’m a reader of short stories. ‘Hope Dies Last’ or ‘Tuesdays with Morrie.’ Those are my types of reading. Math for me is like that. I know where things are going to end,” he said. “You see math whittle problems down into something concrete. You’re solving for something.”

“It’s really a beautiful subject, especially when the pieces make sense.”

Rashid, who has coached boys basketball at North Shore Country Day since 2011 and has taught middle and upper school mathematics at the school for the past two years, said he likes sharing mathematics with students, whether they grasp and love it as he does or are simply willing to be convinced of its usefulness.

He speaks of teaching mathematics and coaching basketball almost in the same breath. Teachers and coaches need three things to be successful, he said: a work ethic first, then knowledge of the requisite techniques. And finally, “You also need passion and patience for seeing young people struggle and persevere.

“It can be one of the most rewarding phenomena, akin to the endorphins one might get from altruistic acts.”

Rashid’s path to North Shore’s gym and classrooms began long before he was familiar with the school and its traditions.

He was born and grew up in Alexandria, a town in central Louisiana. Most of his extended family still lives in the South; his dad in Georgia, his mom and maternal relatives in Louisiana.

His high school academics and athletic abilities attracted positive attention from several universities, giving him the flexibility to choose where he wanted to study. He chose Rice University in Houston.

Rashid played basketball as a point guard all four years at Rice, while he majored in mathematics and psychology (and jokes that “mathematics is slightly more useful than psychology”). During his entire stay at Rice, he also tutored math, a predictor of his future.

In 2005, his fifth year, he continued playing, but he also got a taste of what coaching entails: He broke down films of games in the then-fledgling WNBA (watching scoring and defensive patterns for teams and individual players), did some scouting and also coached a team in Houston’s local Amateur Athletic Union network.

He might have become a graduate assistant coach at Rice or taken similar jobs at Louisiana universities. Instead, he followed two former Rice teammates to Chicago and RMG Hoops, the basketball training business they developed.

He laughs now about his first impressions of Chicago-area weather: “I came to visit Chicago in June and thought, ‘It can’t be that nice. Let’s come back in August.’ It was beautiful both times … and the first couple winters here were mild.”

Rashid remained at the basketball training program while working as an education aide at a local elementary school district. He also earned a master’s degree in teaching from National Louis University in 2008.

In 2009, he started teaching in Chicago Public Schools. In the meantime, one of his RMG Hoops colleagues became the boys basketball coach at NSCD. When that friend returned to university-level coaching, Rashid — who had interviewed around the same time as his friend — was invited to take the job.

At the time, North Shore had varsity and junior varsity boys basketball teams; today there’s also a freshman-sophomore boys team.

While he considers every coaching year a success (“meeting our potential and peaking at the end of the season is the goal”), he’s especially proud of the teams that have won regional titles and made a Final Four appearance in past years. And although he doesn’t coach North Shore’s girls teams, he also touts their successes.

As he coached, Rashid saw how NSCD educates its students, and he liked what he saw. The willingness of teachers to wear multiple hats impressed him: “The person who’s delivering that social studies lesson is the same one who’s taking those kids to Science Olympiad, the same one who’s running the affinity group or this or that club, or taking these kids to volunteer … teachers do yeoman’s work as far as the load they carry and the amount of ability they have!”

Students also want to succeed, he said, remembering one night when one of his teams got back to the school late from an out-of-town game. The bus pulled in at around 1 a.m., and he planned to call in to ask that the students be given leeway to come in late that school day.

“But the kids woke up, and they got to class because they had to present on different topics that day, and they nailed it,” he said. “The same kids who are winning the regional title in basketball are also representing the school in Model UN, are the kids who are performing in the play. They’re the same kids who are winning the conference title in baseball and the state title in soccer. Those are the same faces.”

When Rashid is not teaching or coaching, he spends time with his family: wife Shirlene Sanders and son Carter, 6.

“Travel is our thing. It could be Wisconsin, it could be Hawaii. I’d like to go to Puerto Rico next,” he said.

Although he enjoys music, including R&B classics and modern hip-hop, Rashid admits that sometimes he just likes to hear his tires on the road, or in the gym, “sneakers squeaking and the ball bouncing.”