At Eastern football practice it is not uncommon to hear coaches yell. But one particular voice can be heard booming over all the others this season.

“Field goal one! Field goal one! Kick return two!” Or names such as “Weatherford! Austin! Cook!” These are just a few of the things that can be heard booming on the sidelines of O’Brien Field on a daily basis.

But even though the volume of his voice trumps that of his cohorts, Matthew Smiley insists he’s not a yeller.

Rather, the loud voice comes from his military background.

“There is actually training when we went to basic training and then in the military called ‘drill and ceremony’ and you have to call commands, you have to get good at that sort of thing,” said the first year special teams coordinator for the Eastern football team. “That’s something that I had to do during the military and became pretty good at. I’m not a big yeller or screamer, but when I need to say something, I’m usually pretty good at projecting.”

Smiley comes to Eastern after two years serving in a variety of rolls at Eureka College in Eureka.

He served as the team’s offensive coordinator one year, defensive coordinator the other, and was the interim head coach for the final four games a year ago.

But before getting into collegiate coaching full-time, Smiley was a man of the military.

As a walk-on with the Illinois football team, he used the ROTC to help pay for college. But one of the requirements with the ROTC is serving four years for Uncle Sam, and it was during his time in active duty that he found his niche coaching football.

“It was completely luck of the draw where I was stationed,” Smiley said. “The government tells you where to go and that’s how I ended up in Grand Forks, N.D. It was kind of a blessing because the base was eight miles out of town and before I even checked in with the station, I went and had lunch with (then North Dakota University head coach Dale) Lennon.”

Lennon – who is now the head coach at Southern Illinois Carbondale – accepted Smiley as a part-time coach who assisted when he wasn’t deployed in active duty. Smiley said while stationed on the base during football season, he would do night shifts on the base from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., giving him the time to attend practice.

Smiley was deployed four different times as part of Operation Enduring Freedom and was a first lieutenant in the United States Air Force.

But once Smiley’s military duties were over, he entered the coaching ranks and gained his footing serving as the special teams coordinator at the prestigious Ivy League school, Dartmouth College.

“Dartmouth was my first opportunity to coordinate the special teams and it gave me a great chance to learn,” Smiley said. “In an Ivy League institution the recruiting is different, there are some class concerns and stipulations to get in school are different because it’s obviously very highly academic. That was something that really helped me to reinforce that it is a ‘student-athlete.'”

It was from there that Smiley took the job to return closer to home in east-central Illinois and coach at Eureka.

And while he says it was a great experience dealing with the offense, defense, and being able to be a head coach for a short time, he jumped at the opportunity to come to Eastern when the job opened up.

“When this job came open I was interested in it immediately,” he said. “My wife is a graduate from here, there was a coach that I worked with at Dartmouth who coached and played here, so I had a lot of ties to Eastern.”

And while Smiley has a long way to go to match that of veteran defensive coordinator Roc Bellantoni (nine years), offensive coordinator Roy Wittke (14 years) and head coach Bob Spoo (23 years), he still feels comfortable within the program because of the styles Spoo implements.

“Coach Spoo is so established, and the structure in the office is very disciplined,” Smiley said. “There is a lot of framework to help both young players and coaches be successful because you’re coming into a proven system and a successful system. That’s been a huge help to me being a new guy.”

Regardless of all the yelling (or lack thereof) Smiley uses on the sidelines, for him the future is now.

He could not even speak to questions of whether he would like to be a head coach one day because he views his job right now as the perfect situation.

“I’m just so thrilled to have this job that I want to stay doing this for as long as possible,” he said. “This is such a great opportunity and such a great situation that when I wake up in the morning all I’m thinking is EIU Panthers.”

Collin Whitchurch can be reached at 581-7944 or at cfwhitchurch@eiu.edu.