"The camp would have been mid-November and I got up to speak to the team and I told them the history of how I nearly came to play for Waikato," he says.
"I was on the bench for a game against Auckland when I was in the under-21 team. My dream had always been to play for Waikato but I had to go to Christchurch Teachers' College so I never got to pull on the Waikato jersey.
"How exciting it was to be with kids like me who had come through the region and were able to contribute to the Chiefs.
"You could feel even in that first week there was something special there. We had a young group, eight guys who had never played Super Rugby, but they had good character and we had a young coaching group who were pretty bloody keen and we got a lot of coaching time so it was exciting right from the start.
"I thought if we got this right, we could be good enough to at least make a bit of a splash. I don't think any of us ... we all hoped that something like this would happen but if you'd said this is where you'd be at the end of the year, jeez, you'd be pretty excited."
The Chiefs, under head coach Dave Rennie and assistants Tom Coventry, Andrew Strawbridge and Smith, have something special brewing in Hamilton. Their new headquarters in Ruakura on the site of the former meat and wool research centre are large, with room to develop and, better yet, all their own.
It's a unique place and it gives the Chiefs an advantage over the other New Zealand franchises, all of which have fairly modest facilities.
But after game one and a bad loss to the Highlanders at Waikato Stadium that resulted in long-term injuries to five players, things were not looking good. It's a testament to the players and coaches that they fought back to lead the competition for so long, until a final-round loss to the Hurricanes in Wellington dropped them to second.
They will host a semifinal on Friday night in front of what is likely to be a capacity crowd. "Jeez , we got a kick in the arse [in the Highlanders defeat], mainly because of the five guys we lost," Smith says. "Ben Afeaki, Toby Smith, Lelia Masaga, Brendon Leonard, Alex Bradley. They were all long-term ones. I remember in the changing rooms, we were shell-shocked.
"The board were coming in and they were pretty grim. We were thinking, 'hell, what's going to happen here? Who are we going to get?'. It forced us to play the young guys, such as Ben Tameifuna, Tawera Kerr Barlow. We were lucky with Sona Taumalolo because we had no other props, really. We had Shane Cleaver but he had a concussion problem so he was short term, Josh Hohneck from Bay of Plenty who's going to be bloody good. If we hadn't had Sona, who played the first eight or nine games in a row until Toby came back, we would have been shot.
"Obviously we selected the right people because the young guys got opportunities and they were superb. We took the Blues apart in that first game and to beat the Crusaders away ... I don't suppose anyone saw that coming. And then to go right through to the Reds [without losing], that was incredible."
Smith, 55, signed with the franchise before the World Cup triumph and says he wasn't sure how he would feel after that epic event. It turns out that he didn't need to worry.
