ORANGE PARK - Football coach Merlin Smith has been in Clay County for nearly a quarter century and has seen the good and the bad; from Bannerman to Ridgeview to St. Johns Country Day School to Oakleaf Junior High and now at Ridgeview High School.
Smith, the latest coach hired by Ridgeview to try and right the ship that was once one of the more consistent programs in the county under long-time coach Tom Macpherson, then a short successful stint under coach Matt Knauss (7-4 in 2020 with two region playoff games), to a series of low win seasons in the past 10 years.
"I was here with Tom Macpherson for a year, then went to St. Johns with coach Rodney Dubose (now Athletic Director at Oakleaf High School) to Oakleaf Junior High," said Smith. "I've been at Oakleaf for 16 years."
Smith sees his first obstacle is to acclimatize his thought processes from junior high athletes to high school athletes four to five years older; bigger and stronger.
"They got athletes here," said Smith, who has guided the Oakleaf Junior High teams the past eight years to a handful of Northeast Florida Athletic Conference titles and runner-up finishes plus has handed over top-tier football players to Oakleaf High School including Jacksonville Jaguar linebacker Shaquille Quarterman, four years starting Oakleaf quarterbacks Jordan Johnson and Walter Simmons Jr in recent history, plus a corral of top quality (and very big) offensive and defensive linemen and even, more recently, a high school state weightlifting champion named Pork Chop. "It's surprising. We've had a lot of good-looking kids come in and talk to me, but, as my wife Nicole says, the kids of today believe audacity is on sale. They believe that a lot of stuff should just be given to them. At the junior high, we got away from that."
Smith, who has been busy watching films from last year's teams to find out who his returners might be, said a lot of kids look the part, but don't seem to grasp the full game of football.
"At Oakleaf, we established a high standard of play and were able to create teams near that same level each year," said Smith, whose daughter Jauhna was an all-state volleyball athlete at Ridgeview as well as a four-year standout at Erskine College. "We are going to try to establish that today with a combine type workout that we did at Oakleaf that will give me numbers to compare to in August. We'll do the normal NFL measurements; 40-yard dash, bench press reps, and a mile run. If they want to contribute, they'll work this summer to better those numbers by August."
Smith wants to bring a new philosophy to Ridgeview with his own credo pretty simple: "Nothing changes if nothing changes."