Mike Macdonald's relationship with Xarvia Smith didn't get off to a great start.
Shortly after Smith was hired as the head coach at Centennial High School in Roswell, Georgia, Macdonald, a senior team captain, called him and invited him to lunch.
"I laughed at him and said, 'Mike, you and I will never have lunch together. I'm not your friend, I'm your coach. Once you graduate, we'll have all the lunches you want,'" Smith recalled. "That's kind of how we started our relationship."
Two years later, after Macdonald had enrolled at the University of Georgia to study finance, he called his former coach, who had been hired at nearby Cedar Shoals High School in Athens.