After starting his playing career as a defensive back for American football franchise New England Patriots, Smith moved abroad to the United Kingdom, where he achieved international success as the player and head coach of the Manchester Spartans.
Smith attended Cornell University for two years, where he played American football at wide receiver and free safety and baseball at shortstop and second base.
He was chosen as the State of South Carolina College Defensive Player of the Week for his outstanding performance in a game versus VMI in 1980, and he was also chosen as the Player of the Week for his performances in games versus both The University of North Carolina in 1980 and The University of Florida in 1981.
[7] He stayed with the Patriots for two years before eventually having to retire because his injured knee would not pass the team physical at the time.
After coaching at U.S. colleges, Smith went to Great Britain after signing with the Manchester Spartans football club in the NFL-sponsored League.
Smith and his Spartans also played in the Schweppes Cool Masters European Final in Hamburg, Germany in 1992.
In July 1999, he bought financially struggling English League club Chester City, making him the first American owner, chairman, and chief executive in the history of European football.
[citation needed] In Smith's four months and 21 league matches in charge of team affairs, Chester managed wins against Brighton & Hove Albion, Shrewsbury Town and others, but lost 5–1 and 4–1 to Leyton Orient and Carlisle United respectively, and required a replay to overcome non-league minnows Whyteleafe in the FA Cup.
While scouting Man City ahead of the match, Smith, who came up with a very good strategy and team plan for the Man City match, found that when he could watch a match from up in the stands, then he was able to see the necessary tactical adjustments because of his many years of experience coaching American football, where coaches scout opponents by spending hundreds of hours every season watching game footage of their opponents that is filmed from high in the stands.
This skill would benefit the team considerably the following season, when Smith would scout all of Chester's impending Cup opponents.
[citation needed] His methods included saying aloud the Lord's Prayer during his pre-match team talk, preparing lengthy written strategic game plans for each match that he went over in his pre-match team talk and gave copies of to each player, always staying positive no matter the current difficulties and circumstances, developing a school program where he went with players to speak with and coach schoolchildren, and to give out free tickets to each child for the upcoming matches, and appointing captains for the defence, midfield and attack.
Going into the final game of the season, Chester had pulled themselves up to 23rd in the 24-team division, and faced a three-way battle with Shrewsbury Town and Carlisle United to avoid the drop to the Conference.
He completely rebuilt the team, and in the 2000–01 season, his side managed a respectable ninth place, reached the third round of the FA Cup for the second successive season (in a controversial loss to Blackburn Rovers), made it to the semi-finals of the FA Trophy, and won the Conference League Cup, the first silverware for the club in over 70 years.
In this scouting role, Smith utilized his American football background, where every American Football play is planned and choreographed from a set position in intricate detail, to focus on the development of creative set pieces, both corners and free kicks, for all the Cup matches that were based upon the weaknesses he perceived in the opponents' defensive alignment.
In spite of this success, ahead of the 2001–02 season, Smith appointed Gordon Hill, an ex-Manchester United and ex-England player who was a personal friend, to become the new manager.
In this interview and AppleTV+ video, Brendan Hunt, the outstanding co-creator of Ted Lasso, and actor who portrays assistant manager Coach Beard in the Ted Lasso series, discusses a 1999 FourFourTwo soccer magazine article about Terry Smith selling the American dream in a positive way, including a photo in the article of Smith wrapped in an American flag.
This 22 year-old magazine article was published in England in September, 1999, when Smith was being the first American to ever manage and coach a professional English soccer team.
[19] Smith became a full-time professor at Lees-McRae College in North Carolina, teaching eight courses every semester in the School of Business and Management.
Congressman Phil Roe of Tennessee’s First District, to come to Washington, D.C. for Smith to speak on Capitol Hill to the United States Congress.