Keith Smart life and biography

Jonathan Keith Smart is a retired American basketball player and current head coach for the Golden State Warriors of the NBA. He is best remembered for hitting the game-winning shot in the 1987 NCAA championship game. The shot gave the Indiana Hoosiers a 74–73 victory over the Syracuse Orangemen.

Keith Smart was named head coach of the Golden State Warriors on September 27, 2010, becoming the 23rd head coach infranchise history, and the 18th since the team moved to the West Coast in 1962.

Prior to being named head coach, Smart served the previous seven seasons as an assistant coach for the Warriors, giving him the longest tenure of any assistant coach in franchise history. In all, he has logged 10 seasons as an NBA assistant coach and brings 21 years of professional basketball experience as either a player or coach to his current position.

Among his many duties as an assistant coach with Golden State, Smart worked closely with players on individual skill development and game strategy, and served as the head coach of Golden State’s summer league entry in Las Vegas for three seasons (2007-09). During that time he also assisted the Latvian National Team during the summers of 2008 and 2009, helping the team, led by Warriors’ center Andris Biedrins, qualify for EuroBasket 2009 in Poland.

Smart, 46, originally joined the Warriors prior to the 2003-04 campaign after spending the previous three seasons with the Cleveland Cavaliers. He was named the Cavaliers interim head coach in the middle of the 2002-03 season (January 20, 2003), and posted a 9-31 record in 40 games after taking over for John Lucas. At the time, he was the second youngest head coach in the NBA, trailing only Eric Musselman. During his first two-plus seasons in Cleveland, Smart held the position of assistant coach/director of player development.

Before joining the Cavs, Smart spent three seasons as the head coach of the CBA’s Fort Wayne Fury, compiling a record of 85-83 (.506) and guiding the team to its first back-to-back winning seasons in franchise history in 1997-98 and 1998-99. In his first campaign as a head coach at any level in 1997-98, he guided the Fury to a franchise-record 31-win season and a trip to the playoffs. The club made the playoffs again in 1998-99, despite having a single-season franchise record nine players signed to NBA contracts. He was awarded the American Conference Coach of the Month Award five times during his tenure with Fort Wayne and had a CBA-high 21 players signed to NBA contracts.

In the summer of 2005, Smart served as the head coach for the Dominican Republic National Men’s Basketball Team, which was the host squad for the 2005 FIBA Americas Championship. During the tournament, he led the Dominican squad to a 6-5 record and sixth-place finish in the 10-team tournament. During his professional basketball playing career, Smart spent six seasons in the CBA, two seasons in France and one in Venezuela. Smart also played briefly in the NBA, appearing in two games for the San Antonio Spurs during the 1988-89 season.

Smart was originally drafted by the Warriors in the second round (41st overall) of the 1988 NBA Draft. As a collegiate player, he spent two seasons at Indiana University after earning Junior College All-American honors at Garden City (Kansas) Community College. He is widely remembered for his Final Four heroics in 1987, in which he was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four after leading Indiana to a National Championship with his game-winning shot versus Syracuse in the title game. Smart earned a B.S. in Communications from Indiana in 1998.

Born on September 21, 1964, Keith and his wife, Carol, have two sons, André and Jared. They currently reside in Dublin, Calif.

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