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Fort Bend Bush High running backs Coach Kim Smallwood knows her way around the game.
Long before she came to stand out as one of the few female high school football coaches in Texas, Smallwood was turning heads as a pro player with the Houston Energy and Houston Cyclones of the Women’s Professional Football League in the mid-to-late 2000s.
Before then, Smallwood was part of the first senior class for Rice basketball not to suffer through a losing season after she had won a national title playing under legendary coach Pat Summitt at Tennessee.
Smallwood is now back in Richmond, where it all began, and never before she felt more rewarded.
"I'm very grateful to be here," the fourth-year coach, who has also coached girls’ basketball at Bend Bush for the last 11 seasons, recently told Vype.com. "As a child, there were a lot of reasons I could've quit and stopped and gone another way. Having a strong mother, who is strong in faith and me learning from her has guided me to where I am today."
A product of Lamar Consolidated High, Smallwood remembers sports always being central to who she saw herself as and dreamed of being.
“I’m an athlete,” she added. “I just liked competing. That was my motivation.”
Sports first came for Smallwood as early as when she was just six years old and joined the Jesse Owens track program. Soon she was playing touch football with friends and basketball in grade school.
“We had a village,” she said of her neighborhood. “Everybody in the community was a parent to me. All the kids were sisters and brothers to me.”
Smallwood has adopted the same approach to who she seeks to be as a head coach. She describes her philosophy as being built around a platform of discipline and caring. She said she considers herself a mother to the players and a “voice of reason and assurance.”
Bush Bend head coach Allen Aldridge said Smallwood has had no trouble fitting in.
“She understands the game,” he added. “Just the athlete and her credentials she has and the leader she is, the guys respect her.”
Smallwood said it’s all just a part of who she is.
“I’ve always wanted to coach football,” she said. “I wanted to give back to my community. That’s when I decided to go into education. This is what I was meant to do.”
Smallwood highlights that’s not to say officially becoming a part of the Fort Bend program was an easy thing to do.
“I’d always ask Coach Aldridge, and at first he was like ‘No.’ I think he was seeing if I was serious and knew anything about football,” she said.