One more Ernest effort

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Ernest Smith certainly has the size and the kind of perseverance the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are looking for in their receiving corps.

At 6-foot-5 and weighing 210 pounds, the New Orleans native could fit in nicely with a Bombers pass-catching group that is high on talent but lacking considerably in size.

He lined up at wide receiver alongside 5-foot-7 slotbacks Weston Dressler and Ryan Smith on Tuesday at the team’s mini-camp as coaches tried to get a handle on what the 28-year-old Baylor product still has to offer.

It would be fair to say he’s a longshot to play in the CFL this season. There’s heavy competition for the final starting import receiver spot and Smith has been out of football entirely for four years.

But after a roller coaster ride that goes back to Hurricane Katrina hitting his hometown in 2005, Smith isn’t ready to call it a career.

“I feel like I’m faster, and I’m moving a little quicker, I’m smarter and I’m older than a lot of these guys so I’m a lot wiser,” Smith said Tuesday at Investors Group Field. “I take care of my body and I understand all the concepts. I feel like I still have five or six years of football left in me if I get the opportunity.”

Smith was attending high school in New Orleans until just before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. By chance, he and his mother left the city just two days before disaster struck.

The Hurricane heavily damaged his high school and left his father homeless, one of the thousands who crammed into the Superdome for shelter.

“He was a part of the tragedy of that and how clustered it was and it was just a whole experience that you would never want to experience,” Smith said. “I didn’t come in contact with him until 8-10 days later. We had no contact at all.”

When he finally did meet up with his father, Ernest Sr., it was in Tyler, Texas, about 160 km east of Dallas. His dad had already made some contacts and arranged for Smith to play high school football in Tyler.

There he made a big impact on John Tyler High School and the entire football-mad city, doing enough on the field to attract offers from six colleges, before settling on Baylor in Waco, Texas.

He played at Baylor from 2006-2010 but was undrafted before signing a free-agent deal with the NFL’s San Diego Chargers, who cut him after training camp in 2010.

In 2011, he played for the Milwaukee Mustangs of the Arena Football League and in 2012, he played four games with the Virginia Destroyers of the United Football League before the entire loop folded. One of his teammates with the Destroyers was Bombers receiver Darvin Adams.

“As everything just kept going up, down, up, down, up, down I just kind of got fed up with football,” Smith said. “I found myself having to make some real money instead of just being on and off of teams. When that happens you are not really getting a full salary so I made a choice to move on from football. Not really give it up but move on.”

It was late last year that the desire to play started to return. After quitting a job he had for a couple of years, he started his own fitness company in New Orleans, called ES3 Elite Training.

“As I was training athletes, high school kids and a few college athletes, I started back training myself,” Smith said. “While I’m training myself I’m still realizing that I have the speed and I have a knack for the game so I thought ‘Why not … let’s give it one more try.’”

So he went and walked on to a Blue Bombers tryout camp in Jackson, Miss.

He was then invited to another camp in Atlanta and impressed offensive co-ordinator Paul LaPolice enough to get an invitation to the team’s mini-camp in Winnipeg this week.

While he looks physically like the kind of player the Bombers need at the wideout position, there are plenty of younger contenders, with similar body types, who are better bets to make the team.

It’s too bad, given how far Smith has come, but he’s got a pretty good fallback no matter what happens.

“Business is going strong in New Orleans,” he said. “I’m hoping my clients will see that I had the opportunity to go up to Canada and have a great year and say ‘He’s coming back down here so let’s go and train with him.’ That’s basically the main focus.”

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