Adam Smith arrived at Georgia Tech this season as a homeopathic remedy to the shooter’s influenza plaguing this basketball team for years. His was a cure 20 years in the making.
He was only 3 years old when his father, an Army man stationed in Vicksburg, Miss., brought home one of those little plastic miniature hoops sets and placed it in the boy’s room. That toy rim couldn’t have been more captivating had it been made of sugar.
It was mid-afternoon, as family legend goes.
And little Adam started shooting.
And shooting.
And shooting.
“At 9 o’clock, which was his bedtime, he was still shooting hoops,” Gregory Smith remembered. “We literally had to spank him that night to make him go to bed. That was his introduction to basketball.”
The negative reinforcement aside, the experience of that first day — the unbounded joy of arcing a ball through a hole, of seeing a net dance in celebration of every make — has followed Smith throughout his already numerous journeys.
He currently resides in the Yellow Jackets’ backcourt, a graduate transfer spending his last season of eligibility close to the family home in Jonesboro. And he’s still shooting, providing the Jackets with some desperately needed perimeter scoring.
When a questioner recently asked Brian Gregory if Smith’s knack for depositing ball in basket wasn’t exactly what his regime has historically needed, the Tech coach fixed his best bemused expression and answered, “You have a wonderful sense of the obvious.”
These Jackets have relied heavily upon a transfusion of transfers — four of them playing prominent roles this season, with Smith being the designated 3-point-shot solution.
The skill is not a given. The shot is a whimsical thing, coming and going as it pleases. Saturday was Smith’s low point as a Jacket, as he was but 2-of-13 from the floor in an unsightly home loss to Virginia Tech (1-of-7 from beyond the arc).
However, the sum of his work to date has underscored just how much a program that gave you such brilliant shooters as Mark Price and Dennis Scott had lost its touch. Just 18 games into this season, Smith already has made more 3s (61) than any of Tech’s season-long leaders of the past five seasons.
His 3.5 made 3s per game leads the ACC entering the weekend. And before difficult outings against Notre Dame and Virginia Tech last week, Smith was on a hot streak – 29-of-53 from long distance (54.7 percent) in his previous six games and 18-of-32 (56.2 percent) in three conference games.
At every stop of a military family’s travels, Smith had as a companion his love for basketball and the specific knack for getting, and making, his shot. It was there in Hawaii, where a visiting cousin, former Vanderbilt quarterback and current Jacksonville State coach Larry Smith, spent a summer instilling in the boy the rudiments and geometry of the efficient shot. Who knows how many games of H-O-R-S-E that required?
And on to Atlanta, where by the time he was 15 he was playing in 5:30 a.m., pre-school pick-up games with dad and his fellow soldiers. “And though he didn’t have the size or the strength, even then they’d pick Adam before they’d pick me,” retired Maj. Gregory Smith lamented.
Behind the Jonesboro house where his parents still live his father poured a half court and put up a proper basket. He even installed lights so that the basketball would never have to answer to a little thing like sundown. There the joy of shooting really had a chance to fruit.
“When I built that court in the back of the house, Adam’s game took off,” his father said. “That was his refuge, and it didn’t take anyone else. He was perfectly comfortable being out there by himself.”
“Being on the court took me away from everything,” Adam said. “After I finished my homework I’d go shoot around and the minutes would turn into hours.”
Basketball took Adam on quite a tour from Fayette County High School (where he’s the program’s leading scorer). Then to North Carolina-Wilmington for a season. Then a transfer to a larger arena at Virginia Tech. Then, ultimately this season as a graduate transfer closer to home at Georgia Tech.
With each step, he was introduced to new ways to challenge and hone his appetite for shooting. At Virginia Tech, he was presented a Toronto Raptors-designed drill in which you see how many 3’s you can shoot before missing two in a row. Smith took it as high as 215, he said.
At Tech, there are times when Gregory has to usher his guard out of the gym, telling Smith he needed his rest more than he needed to put up another few hundred shots on his own. Smith’s habit is to make 300 3’s a day, which requires that he hoist up between 400 and 500 attempts on his own.
“It’s funny how guys always want to make shots and get shots and aren’t maybe willing to put in the time to become a better shooter,” Gregory said. “(Smith’s) done that. That’s to his credit.”
The ripples of having a high-caliber shooter on the roster spread throughout a team. Gregory counts the ways: He’s the ultimate bail-out when the shot clock is dying and nothing else is working. An outside threat gives post players a little breathing room and spreads the floor, creating driving lanes. And it loosens the esophagus a bit when anyone else puts one up, “because guys take shots without the weight of the world on their shoulders,” he said.
Also, Smith has been a helpful example. A teammate notes the algebraic relationship between extra work and results on the floor, and maybe gets the equation. “A lot of guys are starting to get here more early, getting in to shoot extra shots and that’s a good sign,” said Tech guard Marcus Georges-Hunt, who is tied with Smith for the team scoring lead.
In choosing Tech, Smith liked the idea of playing with a team that had a reservoir of experience and the balance of some strength inside. Having become smitten with media production while getting his communications degree at Virginia Tech, he also fancied pursuing a graduate degree in music technology at Georgia Tech.
There is music to mix and many, many baskets to fill yet. A pretty sweet arrangement and not a bad return on the investment of a little plastic rim and backboard.
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