Clara Bell Smith Center’s legacy is still growing
Steve Smith helped fund the facility to honor his mother’s impact on students
EAST LANSING – When does a building become worth celebrating?
Perhaps it’s when the space it provides for people helps them flourish and create meaningful relationships that might not have happened outside of its walls.
That’s the legacy of Michigan State’s Clara Bell Smith Student-Athlete Academic Center after 25 years, its imprint measured both in tangible data and countless stories of MSU athletes who’ve found their footing or passion or guidance in a building that, a quarter-century ago, was the first of its kind and has now been replicated throughout the country.
It is also the legacy of MSU basketball great Steve Smith, whose $2.5 million gift — the largest known donation from an athlete to his or her school at the time — helped make the center happen and led to its name, after Smith’s late mother. Smith wanted it to be named after his dad, too, but his father thought it should honor only his mom. Smith’s father was no less proud.
“He would drive by there every time he came up for games just to go by it to get a chance to see my mom, his wife,” Smith said of his dad, who passed away in 2019.
Smith will be back in town this weekend for the graduation of his son, Davis, a member of MSU’s basketball team, who was able to benefit from his dad’s gift to MSU all those years ago. Smith was also in East Lansing last week as the keynote speaker at MSU’s annual Academic Excellence Gala. He, too, is still very proud.
“For my family and my brothers and countless friends and their kids who have gone through Michigan State, some student-athletes, some not, for my mom to still to be remembered and recognized is special,” Smith said.
This weekend marks 25 years of graduates whose lives and careers have benefited from the Clara Bell Smith Center, which was dedicated on Sept. 12, 1998.
The impact has been immense and can be seen, in part, in the numbers. The fall after the Clara Bell Smith Center opened, the combine grade-point average of MSU’s athletes was 2.87. After this past fall semester, it was 3.318. MSU first broke the 3.0 barrier in the spring of 2008 and, other than one semester, has continuously climbed ever since.
“My dear friend (the late) Jim Pignataro, he and I, that was a celebratory moment when we finally broke that 3.0 mark.” said Todd Edwards, MSU’s executive director of student-athlete support services.
MSU’s student-athlete graduation rates have also improved dramatically since the Smith Center opened, from 66% to 81% using one federal standard measuring a sixyear period, and by the NCAA’s metric, which measures transfers differently, from 76% to 91%.
And yet for all the numbers that show success, the building’s story is really its people and their stories — Roger Grooters, the director when it opened, Edwards since 2004, Pignatoro until his death in 2021. And folks like director of student-athlete development Angela Montie, who arrived as a gymnast in 1990 and never left, and director of academic services and head football academic coordinator Mandy Chandler, who arrived just as the Smith Center was opening and has worked closely with many of MSU’s sports throughout the years.
When athletes come back, it’s often to the Smith Center, where there’s been less turnover than on many of the coaching staffs and where deep connections and trust has been formed over years of care, tutoring and guidance.
Chandler, for example, still plays “Wordle” with former MSU football player Jacob Slade every day.
“When I beat him, I get really excited,” she said.
The staff, under both the provost's office and athletic department, is 17 full-timers — among them eight academic coordinators, three in student-athlete development (focusing largely on career services), and three learning specialists for athletes with specific learning needs — along with 50 to 65 student tutors a semester.
“What the Smith Center allows us to do is actually really get to know the student-athletes, where their strengths and potentially their weaknesses are, really their weaknesses, and how do we give them the support they need to make those weaknesses more (of a) strength,” Chandler said.
“So giving them an environment where they feel comfortable to be themselves and to be able to ask for help I think is shrinking down this big campus to a place that they can feel themselves. And being themselves is really what allows us to have the success we've had. Because it's really easy for you to tell me everything is good, but it's a little bit more difficult to say you need help.
“Everyone needs something different. … Sometimes you celebrate a 2.15 graduation GPA because you know it was super hard (for them). And then you’ve got those student-athletes that graduate with a 4.0 and you're like,’Wow’. So you celebrate the accomplishments, but they all are different. It's all a success story. Just getting to know them as people is probably the best part about the whole job for me.”
The process is partly academic and, over the years, increasingly also career-driven, two tracks at once — helping athletes focus on the transition from high school and moving through college, while also getting them ready for the transition out of college, and thinking about both at the same time.
The career services element, which is available to athletes long after they graduate, didn’t exist as much in the early years of the Smith Center or, really, at all before it.
“Everybody is getting the services,” Montie said. “Back when I was an athlete, there weren’t as many tutors to go around. It was more if you were struggling. Now, we're helping everybody to grow and to be their best academically, personally, professionally.”
Back in Montie’s day as an MSU athlete and during her first years working on campus, academic coordinators were spread out in Jenison Field House, Breslin Center and the football facilities. A soccer player might never interact with a football player.
Therein lies perhaps the greatest strength of the Smith Center, they’ll tell you — the sense of community, that everyone is under one roof, that friendships and connections are made cross-sports.
“It’s built community,” Edwards said. “It’s built our broader team in that regard.”
The building largely looks the same as it did 25 years ago. The computers have been swapped out probably a dozen times. Many of the student-athletes have their own laptops anyway, so the spaces are used differently, the computer labs no longer overflowing. The lounge has recently been renovated with some softer touches. And the building is no longer one of one. For years, other universities sent groups to tour the Smith Center as they planned to break ground on their own student-athlete academic centers. The University of Oregon once sent a full plane. The idea of student-athletes coming back to finish their degree is now much more commonplace. The Smith Center staff is an athlete's lifetime career partner, too.
There are also new challenges — the transfer portal, for one, which makes forming lasting relationships challenging and eventually might ding the upward trajectory of graduation rates and ever-rising collective GPA.
For Smith, it still feels like just a few years ago he was on the phone with Kirk Gibson and the late Peter Secchia, hearing what was needed to get a shovel in the ground. He remembers the initial sticker shock of $2.5 million — he gave another $600,000 a few years later for the Steve Smith Scholarship, which still sends kids from Detroit and Michigan through MSU.
“When Peter said the number, I said, ‘What in the? Seriously?’ ” Smith recalled.
He got with his financial team in Lansing and realized it was possible.
“Every penny was worth it,” Smith said.
A lot of student-athletes over the past 25 years would agree.
“The Smith Center was the only reason I was an Academic All-American,” former MSU basketball star Xavier Tillman said in a testimonial video for the center. “They really showed me how to take advantage of those opportunities.”