Bradley Smet has been selected as the new Piedmont High School Athletics Director, pending approval by the school board. The Piedmont Unified School District Board of Education will consider Smet at its October 14 meeting.
Smet is a native of Southern California, having graduated from Atascadero High School. However, he spent a year in the East Bay when his partner took a job at Greenleaf Elementary School in Oakland.
“A few years back I lived in the Oakland area for about a year, and I absolutely fell in love with the town of Piedmont,” Smet said. “So when I saw this job open up, I jumped.”
Smet is 29 with a masters degree in coaching and administration from the University of Concordia in Irvine.
“The Piedmont High School and Millennium High School communities are fortunate to have a new Director of Athletics with Mr. Smet’s passion and enthusiasm for athletics,” Piedmont High principal Adam Littlefied said. “His interest in motivating, engaging, and developing student-athletes in and out of the competitive environment is welcomed. I am excited to have Bradley as a member of our administrative team.”
Smet played football and baseball at Atascadero High School. He was a quarterback in the former.
“Growing up, I was always a baseball and football player,” he said. “I played both in high school. I always thought I was going to play baseball at the college level. After playing year-round for years, I was kind of burnt out.”
Smet went to Hartnell College in Salinas and played football. He then transferred to Sterling College in Sterling, Kansas, where he concluded his career as a quarterback and also earned a degree in History.
He intended to be an elementary school teacher, but after a year of teaching, he decided the classroom wasn’t where his future was.
After returning to Atascadero, he spent five years coaching football as an assistant, and four years as a baseball coach, including one as the head junior varsity coach. He then moved to Templeton High School, where he coached for a year and then served as interim athletic director.
The Piedmont position is part-time – 0.6 full-time equivalent. He said there have been discussions about teaching, but as part of PHS management, the teaching role needs to be negotiated.
The immediate issue for Smet is dealing with the pandemic and the hoped-for start up of high school sports in the winter. Currently, health department orders at the county and state level prevent any high school sports. The California Interscholastic Federation and North Coast Section plan to start practices for the winter sports season on December 7. However, the state and county will have to lift their current orders to do that.
“It’s a difficult situation,” Smet said. “As of right now, we are planning for athletics to happen. It doesn’t mean that things won’t change.”
“We began discussing a plan for a possible preseason conditioning program as our county has started to open up now, and as we have seen other schools and districts do. No contact, essentially just a conditioning thing. We’re in the very early stages of discussion.”