When a coach can lead his team into an arena, and the other schools’ competitors become silent and stare in awe as the team walks by, the program must be successful.

“And that’s what they’d do,” said former East Gaston wrestling coach Doug Smith. “We’d walk into a locker room, and there would be 18 other teams there, and they’d just stop… and part… in silence as we walked by. Then they’d whisper, like, ‘There they are…’”

Smith saw it during the 13 seasons he coached East Gaston, from 1978 to 1991. He molded his athletes to be the best they could be. Come tournament time, as one newspaper columnist wrote, “He’d turn them lose to terrorize the rest of the state.”

“There are probably 30 or 40 tournaments we won all through there (from 1978 to’91). We had a lot of kids that did a real good job for us,” Smith said.

As members of the SouthWestern 3A Conference from 1978-79 through 1984-85, the Warriors won five conference titles and were co-champions twice. In 1980-81, they were 10-2 overall and 7-0 in the conference, and were undefeated – at 14-0 overall – in 1981-82.

East Gaston joined the Tri-County 4A Conference in 1985-86 and was co-champion its first year. The team won the conference title every year afterward, until joining the MEGA 7 4A in 1993-94.

Smith’s teams went undefeated in conference matches in ’87, ’88 and ’91, and went 20-0 overall in 1990-91.

“The best memories from those years are probably our state championship teams, but there were some really great years for the wrestling program,” Smith said. “We had great people; great individuals.”

Two of them, Eric Helms and Shad Ellis, recorded more than 100 wins.

Smith, 57, is from the Riverbend area of Mount Holly, a neighborhood that produced Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame members Bruce and Wayne Bolick (2011, baseball, football) and Larry Hartsell (2012, baseball, football). He played football for two years at Mount Holly High School, and was defensive player of the year as a sophomore, before changing sports at East Gaston, which opened in 1972. “Those of us who are small, we just migrated toward wrestling,” he said.

Steve Williams coached the Warriors’ first team, in 1973, and won two conference titles before leaving in 1976.

Wrestling was a developing sport at the time. The team practiced on folding panel mats. There were only about six other teams in the conference. Smith competed one year in, he said, at 155 pounds in maybe 11 matches. “The sport was still growing, to be honest with you,” he said.

He wrestled intramurals in college – he received his bachelor’s in education from Western Carolina in 1978 and has a degree in physical education and certification in social studies from UNC-Charlotte.

In the fall of 1978, he took his talents back to East Gaston, to coach – and teach social studies.

His greatest influence, he said, was his former football coach at Mount Holly High, the late Delmer Wiles.

“He set me in motion quite a bit, with the things he did, as far as teaching me what you need to do to excel,” Smith said.

Smith left coaching in 1991, and retired from teaching in 1998. He owns Awards Express, in the Shuffletown area of Charlotte, and has a dozen employees working to make trophies, plaques, t-shirts and other items for sports teams. An assistant coach, Kirk Wells, had a business and Smith joined in as a hobby, “And it blossomed from there,” he said.

He and his wife, Toni, have two boys, ages 11 and 5, and a girl, 7. He coaches the five-year-old in t-ball.

But in his office, behind all the business agendas and work essentials, is a pile of clippings from newspapers, some yellowed with age. He has a copy of the Flaming Arrow, the East Gaston student paper, from April 1990. The whole front page is wrestling, the state championship matches from that February at the Greensboro Coliseum.

“I’ve been to every Hall of Fame banquet except maybe one or two over the years,” Smith said. “I’m very honored now to be a part of it.”