JJ Smith: A Newfound Family in San Marcos

As JJ Smith gets up to bat inside Bobcat Softball Stadium, you’ll hear the boisterous electric guitar of ‘Bad to the Bone’ by George Thorogood & The Destroyers playing. Talk to Smith on a non-game day, though, and you’ll see a different side of her. You’ll see the hard worker who values her faith and her family more than anything else in her life.

Faith and family are why Smith came to Texas State in the first place.

“It’s kind of cliché, but [Texas State] has that home feel” Smith said. “Everyone is into the sports here and you know everyone is going to be behind you.”

Smith is just in her first season at Texas State. She comes to Texas State after leaving the University of Texas at the end of the 2022 season, despite making an appearance in the College World Series Final.

She always dreamed of playing at Texas, a dream she saw come true after being named Big XII Freshman of the Year. But after two seasons as a Longhorn, she took a leap of faith and entered the transfer portal, feeling ready for something different. Smith was the only player who started in the 2022 World Series Final to transfer the next season.

“I entered the portal one of the first days I got the chance to,” Smith said. “It was a little bit later in the process than someone would usually go, but not even 24 hours after I entered the portal officially, coach Woodard called me.”

When head coach Ricci Woodard saw Smith’s name in the transfer portal, she knew she needed to get her out to San Marcos.

“A kid like JJ doesn’t go in the portal every day,” she said. “I watched her at Texas and knew that she was gritty and could help us win ball games.”

Through and through, Smith is a Texas kid. She grew up in Rosenberg, a small town in east Texas just outside of Houston. The town is 143 miles away from Texas State University, 142 miles away from the University of Texas. The two schools are a difference of one mile from the hometown of JJ Smith. 

For her, the choice to stay in Texas was an obvious one. Going in the portal, she never wanted to leave home, she just wanted to play for a championship on a team that felt like family to her. Within a few days of her phone call with Woodard, Smith was in San Marcos on her official visit.

The decision to transfer became obvious at that point.

“I didn’t have to think over much to know that I wanted to come here,” Smith said. “It was a gut feeling that I knew what I wanted to do when I stepped foot on campus.”

From the fans in the stands, to her teammates and her family, Smith has felt the community support since day one of being a Bobcat. 

“Coming to Texas State was instant comfort because I knew people,” Smith said. ““Sometimes when people pick a college team, they don’t know many people, so it takes a while to feel that comfort. But for me I had played against some of our other girls my whole entire life. We had already created the friendships just from knowing each other and playing against each other. So it was easy.”

Smith had played with pitcher Jessica Mullins when the pair played for the Texas Bombers, a junior Olympic softball program. She had also played against most of her teammates in high school or on her youth team.

Growing up playing softball in Texas was a special experience for Smith, because while she got to be coached by her dad, she got to grow up playing with and against some of the best talent the country had to offer from a young age. 

“Probably half the girls I grew up playing with are now on Power 5 teams across the country,” Smith said.

Smith’s dad was her coach until things got, “pretty serious” for her when they started to realize that she could go somewhere with her softball career. At that point, she started playing for the Texas Bombers, but her dad was still a big part of her softball career.

This is also when she stopped playing basketball. Smith was on varsity for her high school basketball team her freshman and sophomore years before she quit to focus on softball entirely.

“Softball has been my #1 since I was a little kid,” she said, “I played basketball, but basketball was just something to get my mind off things when softball wasn’t going very well.”

Eventually, the injuries she would get from basketball began to prohibit her softball career, so she called it quits and pivoted her attention solely to softball.

As she got older, her faith became even more prevalent to her success. If you watch on game day, you’ll see Smith take a few moments to herself pre-game to say a quick prayer before the game starts. 

“Having my faith to lean on in the good and the bad, just helps set a good foundation for myself,” Smith said. “Knowing that softball is just a game, there’s other things outside of softball that are way bigger than the game itself.” 

Smith leans heavily into her teammates, too, who share the same faith she does.

“Having something else in common with your teammates is just huge,” she said “Especially when it comes down something as big as your faith, that’s just something else that we can bond over. I know that they have my back on the field and off the field and that’s huge. Bringing those deeper relationships with your teammates is just next level.”

Smith attributes a lot of her team’s success to the camaraderie they form over those shared interests.

Another one of Smith’s favorite parts about being a Bobcat is the team’s belief and mindset that they can compete against anybody on any given day. 

“A lot of people, whenever they face a power 5 team, they go in with the idea already that they’re going to get beat,” Smith said. “But this team knows different. Anybody that we go against we know that we have the opportunity to beat them.”

This mentality is something that Woodard sees in Smith, too. She knew she was used to playing against the best teams in the country and had the confidence to go up against anyone on any day.

“She’s played in the big games,” Woodard said. “That experience is huge, and she brought that to our team. Having a JJ Smith in your lineup is going to help you win.”

Woodard also knows that Smith is never going to make anything about herself. She’ll always be grateful for every opportunity and constantly work to improve and challenge herself.

“She’s just a good kid,” Woodard said. “She does the work and does it the right way. She is never going to be the person to put herself ahead of the team.”

As Smith looks ahead to the Longhorns coming to Bobcat Stadium on April 12, she’s excited about the prospect of facing her old team with the support of the Bobcat fans behind her. To her, this is another chance to show how good her team can be.

“Having our fans just to back us up this time is going to be another thing that we lean on,” she said. “The confidence that we have having already been successful against them, twice in the past year, we’re just going to go in there with a ton of confidence.”

Despite having faced and beaten Texas in a fall game at home, the April 12th game is the first time the Longhorns will return to Bobcat Stadium for an official game since Smith left.

“If we go out there and not play the name on the jersey, just go out there and play our game,” Smith said. “We can beat anybody in the country.”