Most baseball or softball pitchers are fortunate if they throw one perfect game in an entire career.
“It’s pretty rare,” said Henry Smith, head softball coach at Camp Verde High School. “It doesn’t happen very often.”
With a 18-0 win March 29 over Hopi High School, Smith’s daughter, Taya, a Camp Verde High School senior, has thrown two perfect games in 33 days.
“The last batter was their pitcher fouling four or five balls off,” she said. “I knew if she made contact, it was going right back to me.
“So I was nervous. I threw a change-up, and it was like, ‘Oh, man.’”
Seven of the nine Cowboys in Smith’s order scored in the first inning, followed by five more runs in the second that ended everything but the four-inning minimum necessary for the Arizona Interscholastic Association’s mercy rule.
Smith first recorded the feat with a dominant performance on the road Feb. 26, in a 24-0 win at American Leadership Academy.
“We like to say she has just two [pitches],” Henry Smith laughed. “She loves the rise ball, curve ball, screw ball, drop [ball], change-up.
“We decided, a few years ago, that was important — to not just be a one-dimensional pitcher. She can still throw hard when she needs to, and she can settle down a little bit and throw some breaking balls and hit some location stuff on point.”
The two perfect games also represent a return to focus for Smith, whom assistant coach Toni Harris had to talk out of quitting after a frustrated Smith threw down her glove and stormed off the Mingus Union High School softball field in the middle of a Feb. 19 scrimmage.
“She and I had a long conversation the next day at practice,” Harris said. “I just said, ‘If you’re going to come back, you’re going to come back 100 percent — and for nobody but yourself.
“I don’t care what you’ve signed or what your college coach says: It will have a dire effect on your future when you do something like that. You need to own it and then you need to take responsibility for it.’
“So I guess we’re doing OK.”
Even though Smith’s little sister, Tyra, a freshman at CVHS, has been supportive of her sister by catching for her for a decade in the backyard, competitive would be the word Smith would prefer to use in describing how her father pushes her on and off the field.
“With him, everything turns competitive,” Taya Smith said. “You can’t even wrestle in a room without it turning into, ‘OK, separate: Now this is what you’re going to do.’”
Smith, who signed with Paradise Valley Community College in January, since then has hungered to achieve one final high school goal — a state championship.
“Errors lose ballgames,” she said. “We could’ve gotten past Morenci [High School] last year if we were error-free.”
With the exception of March 1 and March 11 wins over Chino Valley and Bradshaw Mountain high schools, respectively, every other game Smith has thrown this year has been a one-hitter, she said.
“Over the fall, I played against a lot of college teams,” Taya Smith said. “I played a lot of off-season ball. So that was a big help.”
For Smith’s father, though, she still has plenty of room to improve.
“It takes time to mature,” Henry Smith said. “It takes time to get good.
“She still has a lot of room to grow to not be a one-dimensional pitcher. Although she’s pitching well, she still has plenty of room to get better.”
