Track & Field
By Mary Jane Souder
Destini Smith has turned jumping – high and far - into something of an art form.
In fact, in less than two years, the recent Souderton grad has risen to the top of her sport and is a bona fide star. Smith, however, is not looking for the spotlight - a fact that was underscored on a Wednesday morning in late April.
That morning, Smith – who has taken her talents to Kansas State - was just one of 34 Souderton seniors recognized for committing to compete in sports at the next level. Listening to track coach Anthony Pace tell it, it was a morning that spoke volumes about the track and field standout.
“Destini was asked what other schools she considered, and she said, ‘I was considering some other D1 schools,’” Pace said. “She had 35 colleges giving her full rides and the keys to the city, but she’s completely humble.
“She excels in everything. She’s a great person, a great leader. She’s going to be truly missed. I think she’ll go down as the greatest athlete in Souderton school history maybe even PA history for jumping. She’s just phenomenal.”
Just how phenomenal Smith is at her sport is underscored by a resume that includes 11-time state medalist, 6-time state gold medalist, 3-time All-American and a national champion. Oh, and in spring, she was named the Gatorade PA Player of the Year for track and field.
“She’s the best jumper all time, either indoor or outdoor, in the state of Pennsylvania and top 10 all time in the United States with now only doing it a year-and-a-half,” Pace said. “It’s just crazy.”
Pace isn’t kidding. Smith had never competed in long or triple jump until an indoor meet the winter of her junior year. She finished first in both events and has done nothing but win ever since.
“She went from never triple jumping to being the state champion at outdoor states within five months, and she went against people who had been triple jumping for four years if not before that,” Pace said.
This past spring, she led Souderton to the program’s first ever PIAA 3A State team championship with a three gold medal individual performance. In June, Smith travelled to Oregon where she won triple jump at Nike 20U Nationals. Then, two days later after flying across the country, she finished second at the New Balance Nationals.
Despite her miraculous ascent to the top of her sport, Smith remains grounded.
“She could be the most conceited person out there and the most confident person out there, and no, she’s completely humble,” Pace said. “She doesn’t get too hyped up when she does well.
“Her unmet expectations hit her probably a little bit harder than most, but in terms of just being a teammate, she’s completely humble. She’s a great teammate, she cares for others, and they care for her.”
For Smith, it’s not a scenario she could have imagined in her wildest dreams.
“I didn’t do sports my seventh and eighth grade years because of COVID, so the dream kind of faded,” she said of competing in college. “Then in ninth grade, I started high jumping, and I no longer sprinted, so the dream kind of died, but coming to Souderton brought the dream alive.
“I really believed I was a sprinter. Now I was a jumper and realized I could go far.”
Back to the beginning
Smith grew up in a basketball family – her mother and father both played the sport and met in college through basketball. Her older brother Jalen is a Division 1 basketball player at Rice University. Destini made an early decision that the family sport was not for her.
“I tried it in my first grade year, and I didn’t score a point the whole season,” Smith said. “So, I immediately after that went to track, and I loved it right away, and I stuck with it ever since.”
Smith got her first taste of track as a first grader growing up in Florida.
“I was in a Christian school from first to seventh grade,” she said. “They had a program at the school – all the grades would practice, and every Saturday we would have a track meet. They had us doing little hurdles, they had us throwing softball, they had us doing standing long jump. It was pretty fun.
“I was taller than the rest of the kids, so I was in first grade, but they had me running with the second graders, and every year I kept running up a grade.”
In seventh grade, Smith’s family moved to Georgia.
“I was in-person at my school for maybe three weeks and then COVID hit, so I was online the rest of my seventh grade year, and I was online my whole eighth grade year,” she said. “I really knew nobody, and I didn’t make that many friends in my ninth grade year, so when I moved to PA (in 10th grade), it wasn’t much of a change.”
Smith attended Upper Merion High School the first part of her sophomore year but transferred to Souderton midway through the year.
“Upper Merion is in King of Prussia, so I was around everything, and then when we moved to Souderton, it was in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “But honestly, school-wise, I feel like it was a good change. Not only the track team but academics in general.”
Changing schools, however, wasn’t Smith’s only transition. Strictly a runner, the Souderton grad switched to high jump when she entered high school and arrived at Souderton prepared to continue in that area of specialty.
Rick Hess, an assistant to Pace, works with Souderton’s jumpers, and he had heard about the transfer from Upper Merion.
“I was coaching girls’ basketball at (Indian) Crest. I have some high jump mats I kept indoors because we had nowhere to practice indoors, and she came from five to six (o’clock to a practice) with her mom,” Hess recalled. “I knew I was going to be coaching her, and I started talking to her.
“This is probably the first or second day she’s here. I said, ‘Did you ever do hurdles?’ She said no, and I said, ‘Did you ever do triple jump?’ – which was my event in college. She said, ‘I’m a high jumper. All I do is high jump.’”
Hess had a different vision for Smith and thought of his former coach at Ursinus College, Ibrain Medina, a national triple jump champion in the Dominican Republic.
“Everything I ever learned about coaching, I learned from that guy,” Hess said. “I had a family meeting with her parents, and I actually said, ‘Here’s the deal. I got the guy.’”
Hess and Medina also had worked together as assistant coaches at Ursinus for close to a decade. So, although ‘the guy’ Hess referenced to Smith’s family was no longer coaching, he agreed to take a look at Smith.
“I introduced him to the family, showed him some stuff, and he said – ‘She’s got potential. I will coach her,’” Hess recalled. “So that was two years ago. He kind of did it as a favor to me just because we coached together for years. He didn’t take a penny. Today, everyone does personal training on the side. The guy won’t do it. He just wants people to get better at track and field.”
It didn’t take long for Medina to work his magic.
“He had worked with her maybe two times, and he called me and said, ‘What do you think – triple jump?’” Hess said. “I said, ‘Exactly, look at her legs, look how strong she is, look at her rhythm.’
“He had been doing some drills with her for high jump, and he’d been doing some regular jumping drills. He said, ‘Man, she does those drills really well. I think she’d be an awesome triple jumper’”
Smith initially was reluctant to switch from high jump to long and triple.
“Before my junior year, my field coach at our school connected me with (Medina),” she said. “I would think I was doing drills for high jump, but intentionally by him, they were actually long and triple jump drills. I was just doing it because – you do whatever your coach says. Eventually, one day he said – ‘you should try it.’
“Honestly, I was scared, especially of triple jump. I had won it one time, but it didn’t really count. It wasn’t that good. I think the first time I did long – I broke the school record and the same thing with triple.”
A high school career for the ages
To say Smith was a natural when it came to long and triple jumping would be an understatement, but it was as a sprinter that the then Souderton newcomer served early notice that she would be a major contributor.
“We got Destini halfway through the winter season, but we still had to wait three or four weeks for her to be eligible because of the transfer process, so we really didn’t get to enjoy her expertise till maybe two or three weeks were left in the season,” Pace said. “We did have her high jump right away when she was able to, and we put her right in with our 4x2 relay because we had three other girls that were really good, and she helped solidify the team.
“One of our other great 200 runners was away on a ski trip for the Meet of Champions, so we never were able to run the four together, but we ran the four together at nationals because they did qualify collectively. We literally went up to nationals just for fun.
“We went up (to New York City) and ate at a fancy Italian restaurant called Carmines. It’s huge family-style platters. We’re stuffing our faces two hours before our race. We go to the race, and we literally destroy it. I forget how high we finished, but we were one one-hundredths of a second away from breaking our school record and three-and-a-half seconds faster than our previous PR. That was the start of like – ‘okay, we have something special here with those girls.’ Those same four girls kept running together in the 4x1 outdoor and kept winning most of the relays throughout the season and qualified for states. We won at districts and then we medaled at states.”
As a sophomore in high jump, Smith advanced to the Meet of Champions, which is the equivalent of indoor districts.
“She long jumped for the first time ever in December of her junior season, and she triple jumped for the first time ever in January, and right off the bat, she’s breaking school records which were in place 43 years - not really knowing the technique, not really knowing her steps yet, just kind of going out there and doing it on the fly,” Pace said. “It’s wintertime, so we can’t practice jumping into a sandpit, and right off the bat she was killing it.”
Smith participated in all three jumping events and medaled at indoors. That spring she captured state gold in triple jump, and she was just getting started.
“She’s a super hard worker,” Hess said. “People ask me – ‘What do you feel like, Rick, when you’re her coach?’ I say this – ‘Have you ever watched the Kentucky Derby?’ When they say, ‘yes,’ I say, ‘Well, how do you win the Kentucky Derby?’ They say, ‘You have to have one of the best horses or the best horse in the race.’ I say, ‘That is correct. Now who rides the horse?’ And they said, ‘The jockey.’
“I said, ‘Okay, what does the jockey do? He holds on for dear life and just lets the horse run.’ My biggest thing was I didn’t want to mess her up because she’s got natural talent, she’s a super hard worker, a great student, all that kind of stuff.”
As a junior, Smith rewrote Souderton’s record books, breaking the long and triple jump records set by Colleen Nuschke that stood for 43 years. She went on to win the state championship in triple jump.
“This past winter, she won the Virginia Showcase, she won New Balance Indoor Nationals in Boston, and she was state champion in the triple jump,” Pace said. “Then in her outdoor season, she won every single dual meet, invitational, leagues, districts, states every event she was in. She won Nike Nationals U20. She was the top American at Penn Relays (finishing third).
“She won the Henderson Invite both in long and triple and set new house records, and she’s beating people by three feet. It’s not even close for triple jump. She needed one jump to win any time she did it. Her best right now is almost 43-3, but we’ve seen her in the high 43s or maybe 44 on a couple of foul attempts. She is top 10 all time in the U.S. in the span of 75 or 80 years of them keeping the records.”
Beyond the records
Destini Smith left her mark at Souderton, but her impact extended well beyond the medals won and records broken.
“We were at an invitational meet at North Penn early in the spring season, and there was a girl from somewhere up in the Poconos that came down,” Hess said. “She was independent, and she was a triple-jumper. She had no coach. Her parents were there.
“I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She said, ‘I follow Destini on Instagram, and I wanted to actually get a chance to talk to her.’”
Listening to Pace tell it, Smith is the consummate teammate.
“She takes the freshmen and sophomores under her wings,” the Souderton coach said. “Even the week before we went to States, she told all the girls – ‘Let’s meet up for dinner,’ and I think they went to Chick-fil-A and then to Playa Bowls. They all went to a movie together. She’s a great teammate.”
Pace shared several examples of just what sets Smith apart.
“Last year at the middle school meet, a girl was running in a heat with six or eight other kids and her shoe goes flying off maybe 20 meters into a 75-meter race,” the Indians’ coach said. “Destini runs out on the track, finds her shoe, grabs it and then runs it to her at the finish line.”
Then there was the time at the Penn Relays when Souderton’s unified track team was competing in the 4x100 relay.
“They’re in last place by 10 or 15 seconds,” Pace said. “And Destini is cheering them on when she’s in the middle of her runway approach on the triple jump. Her clock is counting down because she’s already stepped up to the line, and she needs to be locked in, but she’s trying to make sure that her teammates from unified are being cheered on and felt they had someone rooting them on and helping them get around the track. I’ll tell you what – she’s special.”
In late August, Smith left for Kansas State. She chose the Big 23 school from a lengthy list of colleges coveting her talents.
“A lot of colleges came out of the woodwork as soon as I had a second at nationals my junior year,” she said. “I wasn’t into college at all at that point. I didn’t really know what was out there for me.
“But then it became – ‘Oh, I’m here. Let me choose wisely.’ I don’t know if I really had a top three. Maybe another school of mine would have been UCF or Indiana, but when I visited K-State, I just loved it.”
There undoubtedly aren’t enough superlatives to describe the Souderton grad’s accomplishments in track and field, but Hess summed up his thoughts in a graduation card when bidding farewell to the once-in-a-lifetime athlete.
“I said just two things - number one, ‘Thank you for taking me on the journey,’ and number two, ‘Souderton will never forget you. You’ve placed yourself on the map,” Hess said. “When they look at that 2025 team title, they’re never going to be able to mention the Souderton girls’ track and field championship without mentioning Destini Smith. You just can’t, you can’t do that. There’s no question about it.
“She’s going to get great coaching at Kansas State. In two years, she’s become a student of the triple jump. It’s been an absolute ride. I knew she could be good, but I never knew she could be this good.”
*Penn Relays photos provided courtesy of Tracy Valko: https://solsports.zenfolio.com/p53590508
