Keith Smart is in his seventh season as an assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors, giving him the longest tenure of any assistant coach in theWarriors’West Coast history. Overall, this marks Smart’s 10th season as an NBA assistant coach and his 21st year of professional basketball experience as either a player or coach.

Among his many duties at Golden State, Smart continues to work closely with players on individual skill development and game strategy. He has served as the head coach of Golden State’s summer league entry in Las Vegas for each of the past three seasons and has assisted the Latvian National Team for each of the past two summers, helping the Latvian team, led by Warriors’ center Andris Biedrins, qualify for EuroBasket 2009 in Poland.

Smart, 45, joined the Warriors prior to the 2003-04 campaign after spending the previous three seasons with the Cleveland Cavaliers. He was named the Cavaliers interim head coach in the middle of the 2002-03 season (January 20, 2003), and posted a 9-31 record in 40 games after taking over for John Lucas. At the time, he was the second youngest head coach in the NBA, trailing only Eric Musselman. During his first two-plus seasons in Cleveland, Smart held the position of assistant coach/director of player development.

Prior to joining the Cavs, Smart spent three seasons as the head coach of the CBA’s FortWayne Fury, compiling a record of 85-83 (.506) and guiding the team to its first back-to-back winning seasons in franchise history in 1997-98 and 1998-99. In his first campaign as a head coach at any level in 1997-98, he guided the Fury to a franchise-record 31-win season and a trip to the playoffs. The club made the playoffs again in 1998-99, despite having a single-season franchise record nine players signed to NBA contracts. He was awarded the American Conference Coach of the Month Award five times during his tenure with FortWayne and had a CBA-high 21 players signed to NBA contracts. In the summer of 2005, Smart served as the head coach for the Dominican Republic National Men’s Basketball Team, which was the host squad for the 2005 FIBA Americas Championship. During the tournament, he led the Dominican squad to a 6-5 record and sixth-place finish in the 10-team tournament.

During his professional basketball playing career, Smart spent six seasons in the CBA, two seasons in France and one in Venezuela. Smart also played briefly in the NBA, appearing in two games for the San Antonio Spurs during the 1988-89 season.

Smart was originally drafted by theWarriors in the second round (41st overall) of the 1988 NBA Draft. As a collegiate player, he spent two seasons at Indiana University after earning Junior College All-American honors at Garden City (Kansas) Community College. He is widely remembered for his Final Four heroics in 1987, in which he was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four after leading Indiana to a National Championship with his game-winning shot versus Syracuse in the title game. Smart earned a B.S. in Communications from Indiana in 1998. Born on September 21, 1964, Keith and his wife, Carol, have two sons, André and Jared. They currently reside in Dublin.