Minneapolis senior track and field athlete Mason Smith is one of the hardest workers around. The senior competes in Pole Vault, Javelin, 400m dash, the 4x100m relay and the 4x400m relay.
Smith is the son of former K State athlete and Minneapolis head coach Linda Smith so he has been involved in track his whole life, and has been competing since he was in seventh grade.
“As a kid, with my mother also being our high school head track coach for 22 years, I used to always go up to the high school after school and watch the high schoolers laughing and hanging out together when we used to have a dominant winning culture,” Smith said. “I wanted that with my friend, to be able to push each other to have great success and become like a track family.”
The senior knew naturally that he would have some type of leadership thrust onto him as a coaches kid, but had to learn from a young age from his dad the importance of being leaders and not followers.
“The standard of success needs to be clear-cut, and if someone has fallen short of the standard, help them get where they need to be,” Smith said. “This worked in junior high; it’s easy to assume a leadership position, but when I went to high school, as a freshman, it was difficult to challenge my teammates, especially the upperclassmen who had not cared enough to preserve a winning culture or show much desire to make any improvement to the team. I wanted things to get done. I wanted to be a part of a great team like I saw when I was a kid. Slowly but surely, I began to earn the respect of my upper classmates, enough so that I became a captain of the football and basketball teams by my sophomore year.”
