‘The world keeps moving’: How Trey Smith came to find, cherish and lead the Vols (2024)

Pat Summitt did not expect to hear a voice like that coming from that particular place, right behind her as she coached Tennessee at Alabama. It’s usually supporters only in that section on the road.

The Lady Vols would score.

And the 5-year-old in the Alabama hat would belt out: “Boooooooo!”

The voice stood out enough in an otherwise languid Coleman Coliseum on Feb. 27, 2005, with the Lady Vols earning 94 points’ worth of boos in a 28th straight win over the Crimson Tide, that Summitt looked back to locate it at one point. She locked eyes with Trey Smith. He was sitting with his family and his kindergarten teacher, Beth Hudson, who was sorority sisters with Summitt at UT-Martin and whose son was a team manager for Alabama at the time. As the Smith family recalls it, Summitt shot little Trey a smirk before turning back to coach.

The Smiths were in Tennessee gear, his sister Ashley nine years older and in eighth grade then, dreaming of playing for Summitt and the Lady Vols. They were a bit uneasy to have supplied a heckler to the UT family and friends section. But they let Trey say his thing. Henry and Dorsetta Smith didn’t just allow their two kids to express themselves, they insisted.

As they chatted with Summitt after the game that day, they never could have guessed how things would end up working out. Or that it might someday be remembered as one Tennessee legend meeting another. But that’s the territory Trey Smith is approaching at age 21. And not just because he’s about to throw his 6-6, 330-pound body around like he never has before in a senior season — a season he didn’t have to come back for and is grateful to have — that starts Saturday at South Carolina.

He has a claim as the best offensive lineman in college football, which is made more remarkable by all the practice he’s missed over the years. He has a claim as one of the most effective player voices in college football on social issues, too. Both pursuits are marked by limited preparation, natural ability, powerful impact and lofty intentions. Neither is easy. One is less comfortable than the other.

“It’s definitely going to be me moving forward,” Smith said of calling out racism and advocating for the disenfranchised. “It always should have been.”

‘Racism was just the norm’

As family legend goes, it took Henry three proposals and three different rings to convince Dorsetta Sanders to marry him. They were college sweethearts at UT-Martin, both working in the residence halls after his transfer from Middle Tennessee. Henry was a starting left tackle his first two seasons for the football team there, but when Boots Donnelly took over in 1979, he declared a youth movement.

Henry was focused on a career by then anyway. He was driven from a young age, when schools in Brownsville, about 60 miles east of Memphis, integrated amid much resistance and he found himself in the middle school hallways enduring racist slurs from white kids. Henry loved school from an early age and always sat in the front. In the integrated school, he was placed in the back with other Black kids. He raised his hand all the time when questions were asked, at least at first, until he resigned himself to the fact that there was no point. It wasn’t all a bad experience. Hate didn’t come from everywhere. It did come from enough angles, amid enough establishments in town that were still “White only” at the time, to always remind Henry that Black was supposed to be “less than.”

“Racism was just the norm,” he said. “And what it did for me was motivated me to work harder, to make sure I was doing more than other kids, to make sure when I went for jobs, I was more qualified than the other applicants.”

Henry got a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in business administration from UT-Martin. He elevated during that time to director of residence halls on campus, and Dorsetta was an assistant director. Along with the persistence she required on the engagement front, Dorsetta came with some intimidation. She was as outgoing as Henry was introverted. She was a singer, the life of the party; he preferred a nice book. And Henry always wanted to impress her family. Her grandparents were educators in Bethel Springs and her father, the Rev. Henry Sanders, was a beloved teacher, coach and political activist.

“He was what a man is supposed to be,” Henry said of Sanders. “A husband, a father, someone who would give you the shirt off his back.”

Sanders was also a Tennessee State graduate and veteran who served in the Korean War. When he returned home, he married his longtime girlfriend, Lizzie Jo Batts, and they attempted to buy some land to farm and build a house. They were told Black people were meant to work on farms, not own them. Years earlier, more than a million Black veterans who served in World War II were being iced out of the same GI Bill benefits to get low-interest loans that their white compatriots were enjoying. Trey referenced this in June on a UT podcast, “The Slice,” one of several instances this summer in which he has spoken out on race in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police officer in May.

In each case, including two rallies endorsed by UT and one involving Volunteers coach Jeremy Pruitt, Trey has received backlash. Racists and trolls infect social media. “Black Lives Matter” is an effective summation of the push for basic equality, and that idea seems to be tested weekly in this country, but some want to divert the conversation away from the point and talk about radical politics. Or “Black on Black violence.” Or tell Trey to shut up and play, as one Twitter account did.

“It’s pretty crazy how he’s been attacked at times, but we talk about it. You’ve got to try to ignore it,” said Ashley, who is UT’s assistant athletics director for player relations and development.

“Even though that’s just my grandfather, there are thousands of other people like him,” Trey said of Sanders, who passed away in 2016. “It’s a little bit hard for me to understand why people refuse to acknowledge those types of facts. It’s something that happened. You can’t deny it happened. It angers me, yet we have to just use love. That’s what my grandfather told me. Just use love. Fighting, arguing, war, they aren’t going to accomplish anything. If I can teach you and inform you why it’s wrong, how it needs to change, then we can make some progress. I think the first step is acknowledging that these things are happening.”

Then and now, in different ways.

When it was time for Henry Smith to leave UT-Martin and plunge into corporate America, he showed up to a job interview and was greeted by a human resources director who looked at him and said: “Wait, you’re Henry Smith?”

Henry confirmed that he was indeed Henry Louis Smith Jr. The HR director disappeared, and Henry didn’t see him again. Another member of the HR staff showed up, Henry said, and essentially told him why he probably wouldn’t like working there.

None of this would stop Henry from finding a job and advancing. He has been in corporate human resources for more than 30 years. Dorsetta worked as a customer service manager for an automotive supply company. They raised Ashley and Trey, from Tennessee to Ohio and back. And family standards were passed down.

“Super close, super religious, keeping our faith in God, thanking Him for everything we had,” Trey said. “And pretty much no-nonsense, man. It was ‘You’re not bringing a C to this house.’ They didn’t really like B’s either. They wanted straight A’s. They demanded excellence. Very tightknit and sort of the classic American family.”

The other Tennessee recruit

Trey was not the first member of the Smith family to be recruited to Tennessee. Ashley was a 5-6 post player who let go of her Lady Vols hopes as high school progressed. She was also class president at University School of Jackson, who was honored at a banquet along with other top students from the Jackson area as a senior. Longtime UT director of women’s athletics Joan Cronan was the keynote speaker at the event. Shortly after Ashley and her achievements were introduced, along with the fact that she was considering UT and Alabama, Cronan approached her and said: “What will it take to get you to Tennessee?”

The answer was quick and easy: Ashley just wanted to be involved in Summitt’s program in some way. Cronan arranged for her to work a UT basketball camp, she did well in what was unofficially a tryout, and she enrolled at UT and served four years as a student manager for the Lady Vols. Those years included the achievement of a degree in marketing and entrepreneurship collateral; the thrill of being mentored by Summitt; and the heartbreak of Summitt’s 2011 early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Ashley was head student manager for the team as a senior in the 2012-13 season, Holly Warlick’s first.

“My mom and coach Summitt are the two biggest influences on my life,” Ashley said. “And it was kind of like Pat almost confirmed everything my mom had taught me growing up when I was in college. They both influenced so many lives, and they still guide me to this day.”

Ashley didn’t realize the depth of her mother’s impact on people, in the Jackson community and among extended family, until she lost her. Ashley was working at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis at the time, helping put together championships in 19 sports. Trey was a high school sophom*ore lineman with a rising national profile whose recruitment was already starting to go nuts.

“It was like a freaking bus terminal, (coaches) in and out all day,” said Mickey Marley, Trey’s head coach at USJ.

The Smiths attended games on several campuses in the fall of 2014, including Tennessee. They had no idea at the time that Knoxville would be the last campus visit with all four of them together. Dorsetta took ill shortly after Christmas and had to be hospitalized on New Year’s Eve. She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. She was just 51. After a few weeks in the hospital in Jackson, she was transferred to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville.

Doctors there let the family break visitation rules a bit, one of them telling Ashley that he had never seen a family so devoted to being at the side of a patient. Conversations mostly involved Henry and the kids speaking softly to Dorsetta, and her nodding in understanding with a ventilator in her mouth. In those conversations, Trey promised his mother he would get his degree and play in the NFL. The Smiths had a lot of time to think about all she meant to them. The singing and cooking. The bakery Dorsetta hoped to open. The community and school involvement. The family spades games — Trey and Dorsetta vs. Ashley and Henry — that could go for hours and get too intense. And then they got good news.

On Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015, they were told Dorsetta was improving enough to return home in a few days. It looked like she was going to make it through the extended scare. Ashley left that night for Indianapolis to return to work for a week. Henry started to organize a surprise party for Dorsetta to take place on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day. And then it all changed again on Feb. 10. Dorsetta’s condition took a sharp turn for the worse again. She passed away that day. Feb. 14 became the day of her funeral.

“When you think about it in the grand scheme of human life, we’re so small,” Trey said. “I almost felt like life should have stopped when my mom died. It was a harsh reality that the world keeps moving, if that makes sense. It’s hard to explain without sounding cold, but it’s one of those things where I could have either sulked about it and stayed depressed, have a ‘woe is me’ attitude, or I could get up every day, go to work, achieve my goals and be the person my mom wanted me to be. Maybe a day or two after she passed, I was in the gym.”

That was Trey. It wasn’t the same for Ashley. She tried to go back to work after they buried Dorsetta but realizes now it was a mistake. It was years for her to get through mourning and the resulting depression. It was the three of them helping each other through the gutting loss, going on recruiting visit after recruiting visit and seeing so many families with both parents present. And this is where Trey and Ashley formed a bond like never before.

College football fans made a big deal out of then-UT coach Butch Jones hiring Ashley as director of football administration and special events in 2016, because Trey was the No. 1 recruit in the nation and uncommitted at the time. Several headlines referred to UT hiring “Trey Smith’s sister,” which was galling for her given her three years at the NCAA, UT background and qualifications for the job. But that’s how things go in the recruiting world. Ashley’s promotions since then serve to refute the jeers of jilted fan bases. The most important part of it all is that Trey and Ashley have been able to share this experience at UT. And she credits him with pulling her to the other side.

“I had an outlet,” Trey said. “I could lift weights. I could hit the crap out of somebody. I could get it out of my system. Whereas she had to just sit on it. Through her talking to me, I was able to at least help her get out her emotions and how she was really feeling. You’re not gonna have a good day after your mom dies. You won’t have good days. There won’t be another day in my life that I don’t think about her. I think about my mom every time I wake up, and she’s what I think about when I go to sleep. It’s still not the same and it’ll never be the same. But with each other, telling stories about Mom and things we used to do with each other, it gets easier through time.”

Important conversations

Blood clots created the next crisis for the Smiths. Two things are clear from the discovery of clots in Trey’s lungs in February of 2018, on the heels of a Freshman All-America season made miserable by a 4-8 record and the firing of Jones. One, Trey was resolved to walk away from football. Clots can be life-threatening and, though Dorsetta’s heart failure is not linked in any way to the condition, the Smiths were understandably on extra high alert. And two, this is when Pruitt revealed himself to the family.

Their relationship should be considered among the factors that brought Trey back for his senior season. Trey could have played anywhere in the country and did not sign up to play for Pruitt. He had heard good things from several friends who played for Pruitt at Georgia and Alabama, but testimonials only go so far. Now Pruitt was faced with the potential loss of his most talented player, a few months after taking the job.

“There was never any pressure to play, and in fact, coach Pruitt told us that if Trey was going to stop playing football and wanted to get into coaching, he would personally mentor him, have him do film sessions with him and the staff, whatever he wanted,” Henry said. “I can’t tell you what that meant to us. Coach Pruitt is just a very truthful person. If he tells you he’ll be there in five minutes, it’ll be four and a half. At that point, you knew you could go to sleep at night knowing your kid’s coach has his best interests at heart.”

In the meantime, a lot of hard conversations about the importance of football in Trey’s life took place. At one point he called the man who has mentored him since ninth grade, retired NFL lineman and Jackson native Artis Hicks, and told him he had his announcement ready on retiring from football and was going to throw himself fully into his degree and preparation for a coaching career. Hicks said he listened for 40 minutes, agreed with Trey and hung up.

“I’m not the most religious guy,” said Hicks, who has retired to Jackson, is raising four daughters there and initially met the Smiths at church. “I believe in what I believe and I know God is real, but I’m not the guy quoting Bible scriptures all night. But no lie, true story, I got off the phone that day, got in the shower and God spoke to me. God said, ‘Call him back.’ From the first day I started working with Trey, God started revealing his path to me. I called him back that day and I said, ‘Look Trey, I’m not trying to cause any conflict, but this ain’t it. Don’t make any announcement. Just get healthy and see what happens.’”

Whether that conversation was a tipping point or not, it made sense for the Smiths to get every medical opinion possible before making a final call. They primarily leaned on Dr. Stephan Moll, a hematologist at the University of North Carolina Hemophilia and Thrombosis Center. The frustrating yet hopeful prognosis was that they might never know why the clots developed, and also might never see them again. Careful monitoring over months gave Trey the all clear. He happily put the pads back on again, showed growth as a sophom*ore in Pruitt’s debut season, then had an episode in practice leading up to the Oct. 27 South Carolina game. It was feared, and reported, that the clots had returned.

That turned out to not be the case, as eventually made public by Tennessee team physician Dr. Chris Klenck after Trey sat the final five games of the 2018 season. It was an unrelated respiratory issue. Still, high alert. Extra caution. Doctors put together a medical plan for Trey to return to the field in 2019. That included, essentially, no practice. And again, Pruitt stepped up for the Smiths.

“He didn’t want any involvement in the plan,” Henry said. “He said, ‘This is a personal medical issue, and I don’t want Trey to feel any pressure that he has to play football this year.’”

On the flip side, Pruitt saw more from Trey during that offseason that he expects to be a huge part of his senior contribution.

“A guy that stayed positive, that thought about others instead of himself,” Pruitt said this week of Trey. “You know, at a time when he couldn’t do what he loves to do, instead of sitting around and dwelling on it, he looked for a way he could have a positive impact on others. Trey has really, really been a fantastic leader around here. One of my favorite guys I’ve had a chance to be around and coach over the years.”

Imagine what fun it might be in 2020, after an All-SEC 2019 season featuring two full-contact practices, now that Trey is fully cleared and participating. He would have a chance to be the first offensive lineman taken in the 2020 draft even with continued technique sloppiness from 2019 that he says he has worked hard to correct. A returning offensive guard isn’t quite like Peyton Manning coming back for his senior season of 1997, but Trey may be dominant enough to get fans to look away from the ball at times and enjoy the things he is doing to defensive linemen and linebackers.

“He can be, and will be, the best interior lineman in the NFL,” Hicks said, and if that sounds like hyperbole, Henry thought the same thing when Hicks started working Trey out in ninth grade and told the family: “He’s going to be the No. 1 recruit in the nation.”

The size, the strength, the intelligence, the determination, the quick feet, the flexible hips, all the ingredients are there. Marley, who also coached NFL lineman Trey Teague at USJ, has known Trey Smith since he was in second grade and knew well before high school that he might be something special.

“There are a lot of big people walking around on the Earth, but not a lot that have great agility and flexibility,” said Marley, who is now retired. “Big people with agility and flexibility that can move like that? They’re called millionaires.”

Stories of Trey’s exploits as a high school player, in the trenches on both sides of the ball, are legend in Jackson. Multiple defenders, or blockers, wiped out in single surges. Screen plays in which Trey led the entire way down the field and stayed ahead of his back. USJ assistant athletic director and strength coach Nick Stamper also witnessed some ridiculousness from Trey in the weight room, including a 31-inch vertical jump after a full workout. And then you add in the intangibles.

“Always a guy who took time out to spend it with kids, always a guy who cared just as much about academics as he did football,” Stamper said.

“You know, Dorsetta was such a graceful person, man,” Marley said. “She loved her kids so much, she was such a pleasure to be around. And she would be so proud of her children right now. I said this at the time and I’ll say it again, I never could have handled that the way Trey handled it at the time, and I was in my 50s. If my grandkids grow up to be the type of person Trey Smith is, this will be one happy granddad.”

Take all that, all these experiences, all these trials, the maturity that has come from them, the talent that has been there all along, and place it in the middle of what looks like the most gifted Tennessee offensive line in many years. A bona fide SEC offensive line. That’s where optimism for the Vols in a 10-game SEC schedule in 2020 begins. That would have been the biggest shame, in football terms, when it looked like COVID-19 might prevent a season from happening.

“Very excited about this group, a lot of dudes just want to get after people, man,” Trey said. “This is some of the most talent I’ve seen since I’ve been here, as a whole. I’ve got to get better at a lot of things. Be a better leader. Be more vocal.”

And he isn’t just talking about football there. He vows he never will be again because the summer of 2020 has changed Trey Smith.

An eye-opening summer

Pruitt showed up and spoke at a peaceful protest with several players in June. That got some of the bad-faith arguers in the social media space riled up about “politics,” while endearing Pruitt to his players.

“I think he really understands and he gets it,” Trey said of Pruitt. “And he doesn’t try to act like he understands everything, you know? He’s taken the time to listen to the players, to ask us how we feel. And I think in a lot of situations, coaches won’t do that unless you press, press and prod them.”

Perhaps the most impactful thing Pruitt did in this summer of COVID-19 testing and social uprising was get all his players together in a room and ask the players of color to share their experiences with racism. Trey characterized that as an “outpouring,” though he prefers to keep private what specifically was said by him and others in the room. He did say of the session: “I think it was really eye-opening to a lot of players not of color. To understand, ‘OK, this is real, this has happened to some of my best friends, my teammates, people I work side by side with every day.’”

But it’s been eye-opening for Trey, too, to think back on his own experiences and wonder why he was always hesitant to call things out. Things like one of his best friends, a Black man, attending a fraternity party with some of his white high school friends. Trey said they were told by a fraternity officer “to get that ‘N’ word out of here, I don’t want him in the frat house, he might steal something.”

Things like being told, “You know, I don’t like Black people, but Trey, you’re OK.”

“We’re not talking the 1950s, 1960s,” Trey said. “No, we’re talking 2000s, 2010s. These are the types of things I’m trying to get rid of, essentially, the whole, ‘Hey, watch out for this guy, he says the ‘N’ word, he’s a little racist, he doesn’t really like Black people.’ Then you go around the guy and it’s like ‘Oh, you play football?’ And then it’s all peaches and cream. What if my cousin was in the same situation? Would the same attitude be held? Would you look at him differently? Would you cuss him out?”

These questions aren’t comfortable for some. They are questions Trey said he would not have asked aloud before the summer of 2020.

“Out of fear of repercussions or what could happen,” he said. “You look at people like Colin Kaepernick, he spoke out and you saw what happened to him. Over the years, I went to a predominantly white high school. You’re not always going to have the best experiences being a minority at that school. And a lot of times I sat back and sort of listened to things and accepted it. Thinking that fighting it is not the way to do it because you’re just going to get in trouble, or something’s going to happen.”

Now he sees how he can make good things happen. Henry and Ashley see it, too. So does Charles Davis, an NFL analyst for CBS and former UT football player who has yet to meet Trey but says of what he has seen and heard from afar this summer: “He fills me with pride and hope, as he should all Vols.”

And the audience will expand beyond that soon enough. Trey and Ashley talk often about the importance of stressing peace, pushing love, rising above the hatred, encouraging a different perspective without demanding it. That’s easier said than done when exhaustion and fury collide, as they have this week for so many. But the Smiths believe there is more empathy to be found. The Smiths believe there are viewpoints that can be changed.

And as they can attest, you never know when someone of influence might say something that sticks in your mind. They still remember the great Pat Summitt on Feb. 27, 2005, smiling at a 5-year-old in an Alabama hat and saying: “Someday we’ll make a Vol out of you.”

(Photo of Trey Smith greeting fans at the Vol Walk before a game against Georgia: Bryan Lynn / USA Today)