The dream his father couldn't recognize
Charlotte FC coach Dean Smith has stayed grounded during his coaching rise after watching 'the life go' from his father's eyes while battling dementia
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As Charlotte FC coach Dean Smith rose through the coaching ranks in England, his father was slipping away because of Alzheimer’s
Dean Smith (left) and his father, Ron, in 2008, when Dean was coaching with Orient in East London. (Photo courtesy of Dean Smith.)
by Carroll Walton
Dean Smith’s easy-going, down-to-earth nature comes from his father. His dad was a steward — or usher, in American jargon — for their favorite team, Aston Villa. For the better part of 25 years, the father of the coach who would go on to English Premier League fame and eventually Charlotte FC, would show his two young sons to their seats in the Holte End, behind the goal, and later escort Sir Doug Ellis, chairman of the franchise, to his box.
Ron Smith was a factory foreman for 40 years, working 12-hour days on a lathe, making engine parts for Boeing and Rolls Royce. So weekends were for making up time with his family, Aston Villa, and hanging with friends at the nearby pub, the Red Admiral.
“He was a very sociable bloke,” Dean Smith says. “He loved his football, loved his fishing and loved his garden.”
Smith, who starts his third season as Charlotte FC’s head coach next week, has a similar gregarious way. He looks people in the eye, lingers and actually listens. If he acts like he’s never gotten too big for his britches, that’s because of his father, too, but in the most devastating way. While Smith was climbing the coaching ladder, his father’s memory was being decimated by Alzheimer’s, and by the time Smith got to the pinnacle, as head coach at their beloved Aston Villa, it was all but gone.
Smith stopped to see his father at a nursing home before coaching Aston Villa to a 2-1 win over Derby in the 2019 English Championship to secure promotion to the top league in the world.
“I said to him, ‘Next time I come and see you, I’m going to be a Premier League manager at Villa,’” recalled Smith, who steeled himself for a response that wouldn’t come. “They have that blank stare, you know. You’re chatting to him, hoping he’s understood something.”
Uncovering his father’s cognitive loss
His dad’s cognitive decline was just beginning as Smith made the transition from player to coach. The realization that it was Alzheimer’s came in layers.
The first alarm bell went off for Smith when he was coaching at Leyton Orient. His parents came to East London for a game; his mother always drove. Ron left the car door open and the keys in the car. During the game, the car was stolen.
As an isolated incident, his forgetfulness could be explained away. But Smith got a fuller picture after he took a job as a youth academy coach at Walsall. He and his daughter, Katie, moved in with his parents, while his wife, Nicola, and son, Jamie, waited to enroll at a new school.
Smith noticed his dad spending more time alone than he used to, and invited him to the Red Admiral for a couple of pints one afternoon. After the first round, Smith went to the bar for a second while his father excused himself to go to the bathroom. He never came back. Smith discovered he’d gone home.
“‘Dad, you just left me in the pub,’” Smith recalled telling his father once he got home. “He’s like ‘What?’ That’s when I said to my mom, ‘We need to get him checked.’”
It’s no wonder Smith, known for his direct approach with players, has gotten so accustomed to hard conversations. Informing a player he’s out of the lineup, or the team, is nothing compared to trying to explain a dementia diagnosis to his father.
His dad insisted he was OK.
“Dad, you’re not,” Smith recalls saying. “Listen to the doctors, because they can help you. There are drugs you can take that can slow it down.”
When that didn’t convince him, Smith made the point another way. He picked a number, 15, and challenged his dad to remember it. Within a few minutes, after talking about something else, his dad couldn’t remember the number.
At first, he lived at home. Ron would go to what Smith called “an Alzheimer’s room” once a week, where patients were surrounded by sports and other memorabilia to stimulate their memories.
As the disease progressed, it got harder. One day, he left for a walk and his family couldn’t find him. Ron had taken a bus back to the house where he grew up in the Aston area of Birmingham.
He could play along, at times, and joined in the festivities in 2015, when Smith made it to the Football League final as head coach, or manager, of Walsall in 2015. It was Walsall’s first appearance in the championship in their 127-year history. Ron sang with the rest of the fans on the bus ride to storied Wembley Stadium. But after the game, a 2-0 loss to Bristol City, Smith, who’d begun helping his father shave by then, had to put him to bed.
Sometimes his father stayed awake half the night and kept his mother up as well.
“I said to my mom, ‘You can’t keep going on like this,’” Smith said. “‘This is ruining two lives. We need to think about putting him in a home.’ ‘No, no, I need to look after him.’ ‘Mum, you can’t.’”
Dean Smith taking a moment during preseason practice at Coachella Valley Invitational. (Photo courtesy of Charlotte FC’s X account.)
Smith thought his dad would make it six months in the home. He lived there for four years, the last two of which Dean was convinced his dad didn’t know who family members were, though his mother felt glimpses of recognition.
Dean and his brother Dave tried to make the best of the situation by finding humor in things, like when another resident threatened to call the police on them for intruding in what she thought was her home, or when their dad walked up to the TV to direct music along with his favorite violinist and conductor Andre Rieu.
“I’m very good at compartmentalizing stuff,” Smith said. “It was really hard for the kids. They didn’t want to go and see their granddad in a home where they didn’t really know them. When I was going, I would go in and have a laugh and a joke with Dad and everybody else who was in there. That was my way through, by having a laugh and a joke.”
It’s a strange thing, though, to be recognized by everybody from strangers on the street to Prince William, but not his own father.
And Smith himself has a photographic memory. He can conjure up mental images of nearly all 72 goals he scored as a professional, not to mention the 101 scored in his first two years at the helm of Charlotte FC. His dad couldn’t remember what he’d had for breakfast.
“It’s a terrible disease,” Smith said. “I don’t wish it on anyone, seeing the demise in him. I saw the life go in his eyes. That was the thing that probably hurt me the most, when I looked at him and just saw a blank stare.”
Charlotte FC coach Dean Smith working the sideline. (Photo by Kevin Young of The 5 and 2 Project.)
In 2020, a year to the day after Smith visited his dad on his way to Wembley, Ron died of Covid. Nobody in the family had been allowed to visit him, not even Smith’s mom.
To honor his dad’s legacy, Aston Villa put a steward’s jacket in the Holte End seats with his initials “RS” on it. Dean’s mother, Hilary, asked that his funeral car be driven past the Aston Villa stadium.
“All the staff at Villa Park came out to clap,” Smith said.
Smith raised money for English charity
In January, Smith walked 50 miles to raise money for Dementia UK, an organization that provides nursing and other support for families of dementia patients.
Smith broke it up over walks along Little Sugar Creek Greenway and McAlpine Park, taking along his son’s dog Ronnie, whom Jamie named for his grandfather.
Smith, never one to make a fuss, set a goal of raising £1,500 ($2,045). Without taking advantage of Charlotte FC’s well-oiled marketing and content teams, he quietly surpassed that at £2,382 ($3,246).
If you ask Smith what he’s learned from his father’s illness, he’ll say acceptance.
His answer explains a lot about why Smith doesn’t seem overly bothered by the times he’s been fired from high-profile English jobs and with his comfort level in trying a Major League Soccer job. It’s easier to see why he takes enjoyment in engaging everyone from the young sons of this reporter after a preseason friendly to doing the Poznan with owner David Tepper.
“There will be things that are going to challenge you and hurt you,” Smith said. “It’s how you deal with it. I always used to think, ‘How would my dad want us to be?’”
New ‘Crowns Up’ jersey is a nod to original solar blue
Kerwin Vargas modeling the new “Crowns Up” jersey, which Charlotte FC will use as its primary shirt this season. (Photo courtesy of Charlotte FC.)
A year after unveiling the sleek black of the “Fortress” kit and the electric yellow of the Carolina Lightnin’ throwback look, Charlotte FC went a lot more subtle with the release of the new primary 2026 jersey. For the new “Crowns Up” edition, celebrated at a “kit release party” Tuesday night, the power is in the details.
The jersey’s dominant feature is the same solar blue of the club’s original jersey of the 2022 inaugural season. What’s new is the tiny shapes of spires from a crown incorporated into a repeating pattern around the collar and sleeves. The outline of North and South Carolina are connected by a crown logo. “For the Crown” is stitched below the collar on the back.
As always, the new look was met with mixed reaction, and most of the complaints centered around a lack of originality. But for Charlotte FC fan David Carrasco, who liked the idea of “taking the original, going back to the basics and enhancing it,” it’s not what fans think of the jersey initially that matters so much as what the team accomplishes while wearing it.
“I hope this becomes iconic,” he said.
Up Next: Charlotte FC at St. Louis City FC on Feb. 21
Charlotte FC plays its final exhibition of the preseason Saturday against Minnesota United at the Coachella Valley Invitational at 1 p.m. Eastern. The game will be streamed on CharlotteFootballClub.com and YouTube.com and air on TV64 Charlotte and local FOX/ABC stations. Charlotte will then return home from California to prepare for its regular season opener on Feb. 21 in St. Louis. The first home game is March 7 against Austin FC.
In case you missed it: Taking in a Carolina Ascent game
The Ledger’s Lindsey Banks explored the journey of Carolina Ascent, the women’s pro soccer team that started in 2024 and plays at American Legion Memorial Stadium in Elizabeth.
In an article published this week after attending last week’s home opener, Lindsey wrote:
Charlotte is on the brink of becoming a true soccer capital, and on Saturday afternoon, as Carolina Ascent, Charlotte’s only professional women’s team, took the field at American Legion Memorial Stadium against Lexington SC, you could feel just how close it is. …
I found myself sitting up straighter and leaning in as each minute of the match ticked on. I gasped and cheered with the fans surrounding me. Mostly, I was disappointed in myself for thinking it would be any less.
There is something undeniably refreshing about watching professional women’s athletes compete at a high level in a setting that feels accessible and community-driven — almost as if I was breaking into something on the ground floor, like discovering a new artist before they blow up and make it big on the charts, and you get to say, “I knew them first.”
➡️ Ledger members can read the full article
Carroll Walton is a longtime baseball writer with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution now in her fifth season covering Charlotte FC. She would love to hear from you. E-mail her with questions, suggestions, story ideas and comments!
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