A basketball family: Mizzou assistant Kyle Smithpeters has his own coaching tree

Missouri assistant coach Kyle Smithpeters grew up around the game of basketball.

At 8 years old, he managed the clock at practice while his dad, Randy, coached in small-town McLeansboro, in southern Illinois.

When the Smithpeters moved to nearby Harrisburg shortly afterwards in 1993, Randy amassed over 475 wins in his Illinois Hall of Fame coaching career that ended in May.

Around the same time, Kyle and his younger brother Tyler made their own coaching moves. After 10 years as the head coach at John A. Logan, an Illinois junior college, Kyle took his current assistant coaching job at Mizzou.

Tyler, then an assistant at John A. Logan, moved into the head coaching spot vacated by his older brother.

“With both guys, there was no doubt what they wanted to do,” Randy said. “Our kids grew up in the gym.”

At John A. Logan, Kyle Smithpeters brought the program to new heights, winning coach of the year in his junior college league eight of his 10 seasons with an overall 259-75 record.

It was no surprise, then, that he regularly received interest from other schools. One such offer even came from Missouri coach Dennis Gates, then the coach at Cleveland State.

Smithpeters first met his now-boss when Gates was an assistant at Nevada and recruited a top prospect out of John A. Logan. Even though that prospect ended up signing with UCLA, Gates left an impression on Kyle that the then-assistant coach at Logan wouldn’t forget.

“He was extremely humble, and just appreciative of everything that I’d done to try to help along the recruiting process,” Smithpeters said. “Not many people in this business get that way. A lot of people get upset. A lot of people get mad. They don’t talk to you anymore. Coach Gates was always one of those guys that never seemed to be in touch just for a player.”

So when Gates offered Smithpeters the job at Missouri, asking if he was ready to move, the longtime Logan head coach finally decided to leave the Illinois program for Columbia.

Tyler, the top assistant at Logan, inherited the reins of the program from his older brother.

“You can do all you can to prepare someone for the little things,” Kyle Smithpeters said. “But I just told (Tyler) to be himself.”

The oldest of six siblings, Kyle was born a leader, their dad Randy said, answering for his younger siblings and making decisions for the group.

“With the six of us, you better get to the dinner table early is all I can say,” Kyle said.

Tyler, on the other hand, was the youngest, along with sister Bailey, and dealing with four older brothers who didn’t cut him any slack was no walk in the park.

Everything was competitive in the family, Randy said, and he and his wife, Patricia, joke about how Tyler’s brothers made him tough enough to get through anything.

That toughness paid off: in Tyler’s senior season, Harrisburg advanced to the semifinals in Peoria. But he didn’t realize he had broken a bone in his foot until the game on Friday.

With its leading scorer hobbled, Harrisburg barely eked out a win. Then, Tyler decided to play on the injured foot and scored 23 of Harrisburg’s 50 points for the program’s first state championship.

Kyle said he and Tyler still talk trash “all the time.” But Tyler had the last laugh as the only brother of five to win a state basketball championship. Kyle, on the other hand, led his football team to a title as the starting quarterback.

Both would go on to play college hoops at Southern Illinois University, where Kyle got his start coaching after his playing career ended.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to be around a lot of good coaches from a very young age,” Kyle said. “That has definitely helped me pursue my profession just by getting a dose of it at an extremely young age and being around … (it) helps me get through even some of the tougher times when the schedule is asked to demand more. This is stuff that I’m used to.”

Kyle said he hasn’t really had a break since taking the job at Mizzou, hitting the road early and often for recruiting.

But the assistant coach is used to the long days for basketball: when he played at Southern Illinois, he took a job mowing lawns to have more flexible hours for practice. Often, Randy said, offseason days would include hours of driving between work at home and workouts on campus 40 minutes away in Carbondale.

After resigning in May, Randy recently turned his retirement papers to Harrisburg. He said he and Patricia are ready to travel to watch their sons coach, whether it’s Columbia, Illinois or even doing his own fair share of driving to road games.

It’s all part of being a basketball family, as Randy called it.

“I tell people I have a brother that’s a lawyer, a sister that’s in the medical field, another brother as a state policeman. So it allows me to be a coach because I got all the bases covered.,” Kyle said.

“It was one of those things growing up that our dad never really pushed us. Our mom never really pushed us into it and told us to always do what you want to do. So two out of six of us is still a low percentage, but that’s not too bad for a basketball family.”