Jim Mashek

SPARTANS’ 12th-YEAR HEAD COACH TAKES HIS SQUAD BACK TO LEXINGTON

He walks with a purpose. Little wasted motion. Straight at you …

Brandon Smith, South Warren High School’s 12th-year head football coach, has become synonymous with his school, and vice versa. The former WKU quarterback has created a unique culture on the Nashville Road campus, and his players have responded in kind.

Sustained excellence doesn’t come easily, and Smith will be the first guy to tell you that. But the Spartans have managed to pull it off. Winning is expected, but only if the work is put in first. Winning is the name of the game, but the journey is just as important. Winning perpetuates winning, but only if the system in place stays intact.

It’s stayed intact at South Warren.

The Spartans are returning to the KHSAA’s Championship Weekend in Lexington, this time as a Class 6A squad. The highest classification in the Commonwealth. The land of Louisville’s giants, such as Trinity, St. Xavier and DuPont Manual. There’s only 32 schools in Class 6A, and just seven of them are located in the Central Time Zone.

And South Warren, in its first year as a Class 6A school, has taken a back seat to absolutely no one.

Brandon Smith’s unbeaten Spartans are on their way to the University of Kentucky’s Kroger Field, where they will square off with one of Kentucky’s blue bloods, the Trinity Shamrocks, in the KHSAA Class 6A state championship game on Saturday evening in Lexington.

And while South Warren takes an unblemished 14-0 record into the title tilt, the Spartans are decided underdogs against Trinity, a prolific offensive team with numbers that literally fly off the charts.

Smith takes it all in stride, as is his wont, but perhaps that’s because he’s charted this sort of life for himself for decades, all the way back to his quarterbacking days at Boyle High School, where he played for his father, Chuck Smith.

Chris Decker, the former South Warren athletic director, remembers Brandon Smith applying for a job at his school about 15 years ago, when Warren County Public Schools added a large, sparkling high school on the south side of town.

Smith was ready to go to work, and Decker couldn’t wait to bring him on board.

“I’ve always found Brandon to be laser focused, in just about everything he does,” Decker said in a telephone interview earlier this week. “These kids, they would run through a wall for him … He’s extremely organized. Everything has a purpose with him. All of his coaches at South are teachers. They work well together. He doesn’t micro-manage his assistant coaches. They’re all there, ready to work …

“Brandon, I’m guessing he probably put a blueprint for running a program when he was a freshman or sophomore in high school. That’s what football means to him.”

Chuck Smith, 68, won six KHSAA state football championships at Boyle County High School, Brandon’s alma mater. He was an assistant coach under Rich Brooks and Joker Phillips at the University of Kentucky. He played college football at UK, as a linebacker, whereas Brandon Smith was a quarterback.

A quarterback who got the most out of his ability.

That’s what Brandon Smith stresses, to his players, in practice. In team meetings. On bus rides to Louisville or Lexington. You get more out of what you put in to the effort. You show up on time. You play for your teammates. You understand that no one player is above the team.

And the 2025 South Warren squad is a perfect example of that.

“I learned, pretty quickly, that great football teams are not all the same,” Brandon Smith said Tuesday evening in the South Warren indoor facility. “You can win in different ways. This team, this team does it by committee. It isn’t a team full of stars, but they’re winners.

“And I think it goes back to Terry Cook, and Chris Decker, and the system they put in place back about 15 years ago …”

Cook, the original South Warren principal, and Decker brought Smith on board, as a health/physical education instructor and assistant football coach, for the school’s opening in 2010. Mark Nelson, Brandon Smith’s predecessor at South, had already enjoyed success, at Greenwood High School and in the Tennessee high school coaching ranks.

Smith had played quarterback at WKU during the HIlltoppers’ transition from Division I-AA to D-I status, using the terminology of the time, and he discovered that lessons can come from losing. He realized winning was only PART of the journey.

“We hired Brandon right out of college,” Nelson said. “Coach Decker, and Terry Cook, they were very impressed. When you hire him, you know that he brings so much knowledge to the game, to his team … Brandon’s going to win.

“He was on the practice field, with his Dad, and now his Dad’s on Brandon’s sideline (as South Warren’s defensive coordinator) … Everybody WANTS to win, but Brandon’s going to win.”

Yes, he has.

Brandon Smith has compiled an amazing record in 12 years as South Warren’s head football coach. He’s won 134 games over those 12 seasons, against only 23 defeats. Six of those losses came fairly recently, in 2022, after the Spartans won the third KHSAA state championship in school history.

Caden Veltkamp, the three-year starting quarterback at South, led the Spartans past Lexington’s Frederick Douglass High School in the Class 5A state title game on December 4, 2021. That’s when Veltkamp’s 49-yard touchdown pass, a rainbow to South Warren teammate Tyler Snell in the right corner of the end zone, sent the Spartans to a pulsating 38-26 victory over the Broncos at Kroger Field.

Veltkamp was on his way to Western Kentucky University, where he toiled as a backup for two seasons before becoming the Conference USA Offensive Player of the Year in 2024. The 6-foot-5, 230-pound Veltkamp — he was probably 60 pounds lighter, when he walked onto the South Warren campus, as a freshman — has since moved on to Florida Atlantic University, but he’ll be the first guy to tell you how much Brandon Smith has meant to his football career.

Again, and vice versa.

“I’ve always been hard on quarterbacks,” Brandon Smith said in the bowels of Kroger Field on that cold December day in 2021. “Believe it or not, Caden’s always wanted to be coached. He’s wanted to be coached, hard. When Caden started out, he was pretty raw …

“Caden puts in the work. It’s been a special relationship, one of the best I’ve ever had with a quarterback.”

Fast forward to the present.

Camden Page, South Warren’s 6-foot-4 junior quarterback, succeeded Bryce Button after the 2024 season, when the Spartans finished 12-2, only to drop a 31-28 decision to crosstown rival Bowling Green High School in last year’s KHSAA Class 5A semifinals. Bowling Green went on to claim back-to-back state championships in Lexington, with four-year starting QB Deuce Bailey leading the Purples past Cooper High School, 37-20, in the Class 5A title game at Kroger Field.

Button moved on to Eastern Michigan University, and Bailey to Missouri State University, where both young men have emerged as promising young quarterbacks in college football. Page was a South Warren slot receiver in his first two years with the Spartans’ varsity, but now he’s calling the shots, along with Spartans sophomore Chase Bell, and they’re enjoying the fruits of their labor on the south side of town.

The fastest growing area of Bowling Green, which is on the verge of becoming a Nashville suburb, with the increasing population of the Mid-South.

“We listen to Coach Smith, and we try to hold ourselves to a different standard,” Page said. “Holding ourselves accountable also helps (Smith) … it helps him concentrate on other things, and actually coach.

“We all look up to Coach Smith. He sets a great example for all of us.”

Whitney Smith, Brandon’s wife, and their three daughters are easy to find at South Warren home games.

Brandon Smith has set up a “family zone,” of sorts, between the South Warren field house and the east end zone. It’s marked, like a miniature football field, and toddlers, tykes and other children of the South Warren coaches are usually found there before and during the Spartans’ games.

When the game is over, the Spartans’ players surround Smith, and listen intently to what he has to say. Isaiah Bridges, the senior South Warren defensive back, was almost stunned to learn that Brandon Smith’s career record stood at an impressive 134-23. It’s bound to get the attention of college administrators, if not now, certainly down the road, as Brandon and Whitney Smith raise their three daughters — Maclaine (7), Landry (4) and Sunnie, who will turn 2 years old in February.

Whitney Smith grew up in Larue County, where she played basketball and softball, and she met Brandon while they were WKU students. They didn’t start dating, however, until after college, but she’s usually easy to find on the field after games.

WIth a daughter or two in tow.

(There’s grandparents to help out, here …)

“The coaching staff, at South Warren, is all about family,” Whitney Smith said. “The other coaches’ wives and girlfriends are always around, and I’ll be in Lexington, with my crew … I’ll pick up my Mom in Larue and sit in the same part of the stadium as I always have …”

“I’m really superstitious.”

If this is starting to sound like a ritual, that’s a testament to the Spartans’ success, too. And it goes beyond first downs and touchdowns, wins and losses and the like.

Former South Warren athletic director Chris Decker, who always roams the sideline near the end zone during home games, likes the family atmosphere Brandon Smith has created with his program.

“Whitney and his daughters have softened him,” Decker said with a laugh. “But don’t tell him I told you that …”

Chris Gage, the Spartans’ accomplished, colorful head baseball coach, has about a half dozen players who toil for Brandon Smith’s South Warren football squad in the fall. They include Camden Page, the starting quarterback who started in the outfield as an eighth grader in the 2022 KHSAA State Tournament in Lexington. Page is now a corner infielder and a pitcher, and he’s a South Warren teammate of Tucker Sears, Joseph Fentress, Justin Capps and Cole Kuzma in both sports.

“The coaches, we’ve always shared athletes at South Warren,” Gage said. “We’ve encouraged kids to play other sports … I don’t think the teenage brain knows much of the difference, between a baseball game on a cold day in March and a football practice in the heat of August.

“That can change, when you get to the postseason. My Dad was a high school baseball coach, and that had a lot to do with me signing with Western (on a baseball scholarship) …

“Brandon gets the most out of these kids, really, because he cares about them. As students. As young men. They’ve been paying attention, too.”

South Warren and Trinity will tangle in the second game on Saturday during the KHSAA’s Championship Weekend. Expect both of them back before much longer.