SAN ANTONIO – Zelinda Camacho has played softball for as long as she can remember.
Four years old, to be exact, is when she first was introduced to the sport. But when Camacho, who had always dreamed of attending UTSA, graduated high school, she was certain that her playing days were over.
“It got to my senior year of high school and I wasn’t getting any offers,” Camacho said. “I always wanted to go to UTSA and it was my dream school. I knew I wasn’t going to play, so I was just getting ready to go to UTSA as a student.”
Camacho, a native of Mercedes, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, was a standout player at Mercedes Early College Academy. She was the UIL 32-5A Co-District Most Valuable Player as a senior and also earned Texas Girls Coaches Association Class 5A All-State selection. Camacho earned the distinction of being the best player in her area, as she was chosen as the Most Valuable Player of the RGV East/West All-Star Game.
In addition to her prowess on the softball field, Camacho also excelled in the classroom. She earned 60 hours of college credit as a high school student, all of which transferred to UTSA, as part of a public school program. In terms of academic standing, Camacho entered UTSA as a junior.
“I attended Early College and started taking college classes the spring semester of my freshman year in high school,” Camacho said. “I actually graduated with my associate’s degree in college before I even graduated from high school. It was great to get a feel of how college was going to be at such a young age without it hurting our pockets.”
Camacho’s arrival at UTSA coincided with the hire of Vann Stuedeman as the program’s head softball coach on June 22, 2023. Stuedeman, who brought with her a long list of accomplishments coaching at Alabama and Mississippi State, was putting together her first team in San Antonio.
Stuedeman initially was looking to add a pitcher to her roster who could throw batting practice. She suggested to assistant coach Tori Smith that they try to find a former high school softball player currently enrolled at UTSA. Smith, who is known for her recruiting prowess and has extensive ties in the state of Texas as a junior college coach, already knew of Camacho and suggested that the coaching staff speak to her.
One day, Camacho got a phone call that she wasn’t expecting from Stuedeman, asking if she had interest in joining the Roadrunners softball team. The call came while Camacho was at the doctor’s office with her father, Ricardo, during a particularly emotional time.
“I was actually at the doctor’s office with my dad, finding out that his cancer had just come back again,” she said. “It was surprising and my heart felt full because I knew that I was going to be able to start playing again and that it was my dad’s biggest dream, as well as my biggest dream, to continue on to a bigger stage. It was a full-circle moment, especially right there at the doctor’s office.”
Camacho, her parents and family members visited the UTSA campus and it was immediately apparent that she was a perfect fit for the program Stuedeman is building.
“Zelinda was excited about the opportunity and her parents were excited about the opportunity,” Stuedeman said. “She jumped on board and got after it right away.”
What Stuedeman and her staff quickly learned about Camacho is that she brought unique talents that would make her an important piece of the Roadrunners’ pitching staff.
“We were very impressed,” Stuedeman said. “She has some of the highest spin rates on our roster and she teeters into the elite range of spin rate for all of college softball. What she doesn’t have is the velocity to go with the spin rate. Her velocity is in the high 50s. When she is spinning it really well, she is hard to hit. Some of that velocity works in her favor because everybody is used to hitting 65. With the combination of her spin and a little less velocity, and also being able to throw two or three different speeds, that sets her up for success and sets our team up for success.”
Practically since birth, Camacho has looked up to her sister, Lucina Garcia, who is 10 years her senior.
“She’s a big role model and one of my biggest supporters,” Camacho said. “She was always helping out other people and was the kindest person you could ever meet. Seeing how she was with other people and how she interacted with them at such a young age, I always knew that I wanted to give back.”
Lucinda has been Camacho’s primary inspiration in pursuing a career in elementary education.
“She’s the person I look up to the most, but it also came from my teachers, seeing how they interacted with me, seeing how they pushed me to be harder on myself and to get better grades,” Camacho said. “You could see how much they made a difference in other people’s lives. If anybody asks me why I’ve chosen teaching, it’s because I wanted to give back to my community.”
From the start, Camacho’s coaches and teammates have seen her desire to help others translate to the softball field and in the locker room.
“What I enjoy about Zelinda is that she truly has a teacher’s heart,” Stuedeman said. “That is what I look for in my pitching staffs because I believe teaching is a higher level of learning. And when she is teaching others in the bullpen, she is then processing and learning some things as well. She has taken on that servant leadership role in the bullpen and really helps all of the pitchers out regardless of their class. She wants to help her teammates and is invested in doing whatever she can to be as good as she can and for our team to be as good as it can.”
By the time she had joined the UTSA softball program, Camacho was already enrolled in classes for the fall of 2023 without the benefit of priority registration. She was taking classes at UTSA’s downtown campus and traveling between the campuses multiple times per day.
“I didn’t know that I was coming here to play softball, so I had made my own schedule,” Camacho said. “It was hard juggling practice both on the field and in the weight room, and then having to go to class downtown. I was commuting all the time.”
In her first semester with the team, Camacho’s schedule rarely coincided with scheduled team practices and strength and conditioning sessions. Instead, she would work on pitching with Stuedeman early in the mornings and then do individual training with Sophia Kennedy, the team’s sports performance coach, later in the day.
“All fall, we had her individual sessions at 7 a.m. so she could get downtown to her classes,” Stuedeman said. “She was willing to do that and I was willing to do that, so we made it work. To me, it just expresses how much she wants to do this and how good she wants to be, because she’s willing to put in the time on her own above and beyond all of her school work, which is a heavy load.”
In what was a surreal moment last October shortly after she joined the team, Camacho found herself pitching against perennial power Texas on its home field in a fall contest. She had long dreamed of playing at Austin’s Red & Charline McCombs Field, also the home of the University Scholastic League State Tournament. But her high school team had never advanced to the finals site.
“It was nerve-wracking for sure, but I also felt happy,” Camacho said. “I was playing and I was living out my biggest dream on that field, knowing that I could have been there, but my senior year in high school we came up short in the playoffs.”
Camacho didn’t get much of a chance to get to know her teammates last fall, but really embraced the opportunity to practice, play and travel with them during the spring semester. She made 17 appearances for UTSA during the 2024 season, pitching 31 innings and notching a 2-0 record in the circle.
“My teammates welcomed me with open arms and they’re really my best friends,” Camacho said. “They said that if I ever need anything, they’re going to be there. I always know that I can count on them. I always have their back and they always have mine.”
The positive impact that Camacho had on her teammates was instantly apparent.
“As soon as she was able to be with the team more in the spring, she just blossomed,” Stuedeman said. “Her personality started showing, her confidence started showing and you could just see the bullpen rally around her. She really cares about her teammates.”
This school year, Camacho will also need to take part in student teaching to fulfill her educational requirements and prepare for her future career. It adds another challenge to her schedule, but it’s one that she has embraced.
“She has managed to schedule everything she has to do on Tuesdays so that she can be with the team a little bit more than she was last fall,” Stuedeman said. “I think it just shows her willingness. If you have a kid who is doing everything they can academically to manipulate their schedule to be involved as much as they can, of course we are going to go out of our way to help her be able to achieve her dreams. Whatever her schedule is, we work around it, and she works her schedule around softball. We just make it work together.”
For Camacho, the opportunity to be a student-athlete at UTSA has fulfilled many of her lifelong aspirations. And it has also served as great preparation for her desire to spend her future career giving back to others.
“It makes me proud to wear UTSA across my chest,” Camacho said. “I just want to be able to make an impact on people and have people say, ‘She was a great teammate.’ I’ve dreamt about doing this on the big stage and to be able to do it at my dream school, I can proudly say that I am a Roadrunner.”