PANAMA CITY, Fla. (WMBB) – This week’s Scholar Athlete of the Week sponsored by Perry and Young P.A. is Bay’s, Samantha Smith.
Smith is a three-sport athlete at Bay, playing soccer, tennis and running cross country. Her favorite sport is soccer, but she said all three were passed down to her from her siblings.
“Well my family has always really loved running,” Smith said. “My dad is a huge runner, then my older brother and my older sister, my sister went to Bay, she did cross country and soccer and they also played tennis, so I just sort of knew I wanted to play those sports when I got to high school.”
The senior captain has played all four years of high school on the Tornadoes soccer team, and she excels in the classroom with a 4.3 GPA in the AICE program, an achievement her head coach Jack Focke said is quite incredible.
“It’s just wonderful to have seen her growth through the years and how she’s been able to balance the sports and academics at the same time and to really kind of grow into that role,” Focke said. “And to even have that understanding going forward that academics is where she wants to go, that’s truly what we want to see.”
Academics are Smith’s main focus as she heads toward graduation and she already has a good idea of what she wants to study wherever she chooses to go to college.
“I took psychology last year, it was one of my AICE exams and I had a really, really wonderful teacher, Mr. Taylor, and I just fell in love with the subject,” Smith said. “I just really like how it was really interesting that you could discover all these things about people that like weren’t really known.”
With three sports, involvement in several clubs and a stellar GPA, free time doesn’t come around often for Smith, but to her, she’s accomplished everything that she’s set out to and more.
“It’s definitely tough to juggle,” Smith said. “And it’s really difficult to keep doing everything, I just know that in the end, it will be really worth it and that I’ll be really proud of myself in that I was able to do everything that I wanted.”