Scott Smith’s Path to Softball and the Culture He Has Built with the Texas Bombers

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Scott Smith is the Bombers National Program Director, coaching the 18 and under Texas Bombers Gold team since 2001. They have 125 teams today across 15 states.

He spent 28 years in the military and played baseball for many years. His coaching career began when his daughter started playing softball around age six. He served as her coach as he felt that he could support her and get involved. He has since kept coaching and now has players competing at the highest level. He’s even had 600 kids since 2009 get a college scholarship.

Just this year, the Bombers achieved their sixth national championship. Their 14 and under Gold team won the national championship. They played for three national championships; they won one of them and got third at PGF.

“We kind of run [the Bombers National Program] like a minor league baseball model. Just like the MLB, when you’re categorizing the depth of a farm system, and what talent is in that program, and how good it can be for years to come, we feel really good about it all the way down to our 12 year olds,” he says, “and when you have 2000 players in your program, you have a lot to begin with.”

He doesn’t think they’ve built a culture, and instead keeps the program pretty free. “I think people are shocked to know how, like even with my own team, how loose we are.” But what they have is consistency, which Smith considers the standard — and he doesn’t negotiate the standard with them.

“I think that’s something we try to preach down through the program, is that these are the standards. And for most part there were players that came years in advance of the players that are here today that set those standards, and we’re just the gatekeeper of the standards,” he says.

“I think players have sought that out too,” says Smith. He says they’ve had players come here specifically because of what they’re about, which he admits is a cool feeling — that parents and kids want to be part of what they’re doing.

They also have a military aspect to what they do. They started a foundation called “For the Heroes” and every player in the program wears the name of a fallen soldier on the back of their jersey, and they honor that person. Whether it’s a first responder or a military veteran, the players understand that this stuff they all get to do didn’t come free.

In the Bombers’ lab, they have college athletes who are alumni come back to work. “That was always my vision…that this was the place that they came here to get that work in,” says Smith. And their everyday players come to the lab as well to run a test or retest model. The Bombers coaches also do a lot of evaluation and analyzing with them in establishing their go forward steps throughout the next six to eight weeks.

In the end, Smith says the Bomber’s vision is to continually find a way to make players better than they were yesterday. “Blast Motion has played a significant role in that for us…just seeing visual differences in our production on the field, our performance, and being able to attribute it to something.”

To view more content from the Texas Bombers organization, visit our Youtube page.

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