September 2024 ~
Kayla Smith (Benson, 2009) never really had a fighting chance.
Sure, nobody swept her off her feet after she took her first steps and hauled her off to Toddler Track Academy. But take a quick look at some of her family lineage and judge for yourself:
Her late mother, Lisa Broadous Smith (Benson, 1982), was a PIL champion, one-time school record-holding sprinter and long jumper and the first Benson female ever to score points in the Oregon state high school championships. Her father, Charles Smith, and sister, Shadae, both played basketball at Jefferson, and he went on to play at Linfield.
Smith’s uncle and 2017 PIL Hall of Fame inductee, Tony Broadous, was a three-sport star at Jefferson and coached Grant basketball from 2002 to 2012, winning a state championship in 2008 and PIL Coach of the Year honors in 2003 and 2008. Then there’s her cousin, Andre Broadous, whose list of athletic accomplishments is so long it’s easier to just to take the short trip to his own Hall of Fame page.
This is not exactly the type of familial environment that is going to inspire an impressionable youth to grow up aspiring to, say, rock collecting. Right?
“I grew up in northeast Portland and everybody played or had played sports,” Smith says from Dallas, Texas, her home since 2021. “My parents started me in track at age 6 and I just did it non-stop. From then on there was never a time when I did not do track. I can’t say I was always great, but I kept going and I think that consistency really helped me.”
If Smith wasn’t always great, she got there quickly. After competing her freshman year at Parkrose, she transferred to Benson and, under the tutelage of renowned track coaches Leon McKenzie and Ronnie Harrison, took off.
“Over the years I had been competing in AAU meets against girls from other states, like Texas,” Smith says. “So, by the time I got to high school, I was able to compete at a high level because of the caliber of athletes I had already been competing against. Then, when I transferred to Benson, it was like entering a whole different world of track. All the coaches I’d had up to then were great, but Coach McKenzie was the track man in Oregon. One of the highlights of my high school career was knowing I was being coached by the best.”
(Inducted into the PIL Hall of Fame in 2014, Leon McKenzie coached Benson track for 29 years, was named Oregon high school coach of the year 15 times and National coach of the year twice. His Benson teams won a combined 11 state titles.)
While at Parkrose, Smith had developed an admiration and respect for a pair of outstanding runners older than her from Benson and Jefferson who were winning most of the competitions in her events, the 100 and 200 meters. They inspired and motivated her to one day surpass their records and accomplishments.
“I always looked up to them, knowing they were the two girls to beat. And I did wind up doing that,” Smith says.
Her first year at Benson, Smith won PIL titles in the 100 and 200 meters as well as the long jump. She won the 100m and 200m PIL and state titles her junior and senior years, adding the long-jump state championship as a senior. “My dad likes to take credit for that because he also competed in the long jump while in high school,” she says, adding that one of her most memorable high school accomplishments was breaking her mother’s Benson record in the 100 meters.
“To build off all her accomplishments and make my own was amazing,” she says.
Smith’s fastest times in the 200m (24.01s) and 100m (11.77s) are still in the top 10 all-time for Oregon women.
“After my coaches helped improve my technique, I really tarted tapping into my real speed and who I was as an athlete,” she says. “Once thsat happened, my races weren’t really close.” Then Smith adds with a laugh, “When I raced at state, it wasn’t anything like, ‘Who won?’”
While the records and championships are certainly a highlight of her high school career, Smith says her fondest memories are of “all the people I was able to meet and the friendships I had and connections I made with coaches and athletes. I still have many of those relationships.”
As good as Smith was in competition, she was equally popular among her teammates, especially the younger ones looking up to her. “Lot of girls would come up and tell me, “You’re so fast but also so nice. I was always the girl cheering them on.”
After graduating, Smith fielded scholarship offers from several schools. The University of Oregon offered her close to a full ride but, Smith says, “I knew I could do better.”
After a great visit to Washington State, Smith was almost ready to commit to the Cougars. She decided to hold off until making a trip to Oklahoma whose coach, as a favor she may have later regretted, offered to introduce Smith to a friend who coached at the University of Illinois.
“I had told WSU I was most likely going there, but when I got to Illinois, I knew that was where I wanted to go,” she says. “The culture was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The coach and I connected really well. When I met the track girls, it immediately felt like we were sisters. It felt like a place where I could thrive and have a successful college career.”
Looking back on the decision today, Smith wonders if WSU would have been the better choice. “WSU was a great school, but I had wanted to get farther away from Oregon, where I felt so sheltered, especially in track,” she says. “I just wanted to go someplace far away from home where I didn’t know anybody and could come into who I was as a woman.”
As it turned out, Smith’s transition from championship high school track star to major college student-athlete was a difficult one. “Being a college student and athlete was difficult. I still loved competing, but there was no dramatic change in my times. And I will say that once I got there, I did start feeling a little burned out. I had been running track so long that I started wondering what my next life was going to look like.”
After earning her degree in 2013, Smith moved back to Portland, had a baby and worked for Providence Health System for five years before going to work at Nike as a senior administrative assistant. She also coached tracked at De LaSalle High School in 2017-18 and was an assistant coach at Benson in 2019.
In Dallas, she works as a full-time personal trainer and mother to 10-year-old Jada who, so far, is resisting the many suggestions she’s heard from others to follow in her mom’s fast footsteps.
“She’s been against it, but everyone has been telling her that she should do it and she may,” Smith says.
Smith was inducted into the PIL Hall of fame in 2020 at the same time as her mother. Both also are members of the Benson Hall of Fame.
“Learning that I had made the PIL Hall of Fame was a great moment,” Smith says. “Then to learn my mom was being inducted at the same time, a year after her passing, was really special for our whole family. I couldn’t have asked for a better moment than that.”
Do you know Kayla Smith? If you’d like to reconnect, she can be reached at [email protected]
Note: click on a photo to see its caption.
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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