His workmates at first thought he was joking. But when he turned grey, the chef, who had recently trained in first aid, quickly began doing CPR.
"I had CPR for 17 minutes while the ambulance came. When the ambulance came I had the external defibrillator to get my heart beat back.
"They got me into the ambulance. On the way to hospital my heart ... stopped again. I had to have another [shock from the defibrillator]," says Smith, a second-year physiotherapy student at Auckland University of Technology.
He spent a fortnight in Tauranga Hospital before being shifted to Waikato Hospital to have the defibrillator installed. At first he was diagnosed with long QT syndrome, an abnormal heart rhythm, but after later blood tests he was told he had a heart condition of unknown cause.
Smith described going through emotional turmoil - grief, anger, denial, feelings of unfairness, blaming himself for the effect of his cardiac arrest on his family because it came immediately after his grandfather's death - but has since managed to focus on his dreams, despite scepticism from his doctor. He wants to play professional water polo in Europe.
"The cardiologist had told me that the chances of me playing sport again and living the life that I was leading before was almost out of the picture. Then I got very determined and cleaned up my whole way of thinking and now I don't dwell on things that are not important."
Smith knows the risks of playing a contact sport, including that the defibrillator could get knocked and malfunction, shocking his heart when not needed, but he reckons that as a goalkeeper the risks are lower than if he played in other positions. But he keeps his mind off those thoughts.
"The more I worry about, I'm not thinking about the game completely."
