Sammy Smith is one of the nation’s emerging two-sport athletes with a rare combination.
She is an elite soccer player — a U-17 World Cup goal scorer and a Stanford Cardinal freshman. She is also the only teen on the senior national team in cross-country skiing.
On this week’s agenda is the start of Smith’s first NCAA Tournament. Stanford, a No. 3 seed and last year’s national runner-up, hosts UC Santa Barbara on Friday. The tournament runs through a championship game on Dec. 9, the first day of Stanford’s fall quarter exam week.
Smith could spend much of Stanford’s winter quarter, which begins Jan. 6, doing classwork while crisscrossing Europe for World Cup ski races. Possibly at the world championships in Norway in late February and early March, too.
Smith’s goal is to play each sport at the highest level possible for as long as possible.
As one of five women on the U.S. cross-country skiing A team, she is in early contention to make the 2026 Olympic team of up to eight women. That roster will be finalized in January 2026.
“I want to do everything I can to help the (soccer) team and to hopefully win a national championship,” said Smith, who has played in 12 of Stanford’s 18 matches as a sub. “So right now, that’s been my focus, and is my absolute focus until the season’s over. Obviously, I try and do extra training when I can. I love fitness, so the extra running outside of practice, and the additional training I do, it’s both very beneficial for soccer, because I think it pays dividends on the field, but it also is putting me in a better place for any opportunities this winter.”
Smith split her childhood between Boise and, in winter months, the slopes of Sun Valley.
She benefited from athletic parents: mom Kristin rowed for Stanford and won the 2008 half-Ironman triathlon world championship for the 40-44 age group. Dad Steve played soccer at Duke.
Smith made the most of being a middle child. She tagged along with older sister Logan, who is a junior on the Stanford soccer team. She was pushed by younger brother Tucker, a Boise High senior who this year did Alpine skiing races in Austria and Italy, then co-captained a state championship soccer team.
The family also started Go Big Inc., a non-profit that’s an acronym for “giving opportunity by inspiring gratitude.” Go Big helps underprivileged kids in the Boise community. Events have included a book drive and swim clinic.
On skis before age 1 1/2, two of Smith’s favorite words as a toddler were “self” — as in do it myself — and “more.”
“Maybe there was some genetic advantage there,” dad Steve said, “but a lot of it I think came from an internal motivation.”
In junior high, Smith also played tailback, cornerback and placekicked and punted on the school football team. Her younger brother was her lead-blocking fullback. But that ended when she broke her arm while tackling a few games into the season.
That was one of the many days when Smith’s sports worlds collided. While in the emergency room, Smith learned that she had been invited to her first U.S. Soccer youth national team camp.
“She was absolutely hysterical that she might miss this opportunity,” due to the broken arm, Kristin said.
They got an approved cast. She took part in the October 2019 U.S. under-15 girls’ national team talent identification camp while in eighth grade.
Smith won Idaho state high school titles in soccer, cross-country running and track (in the 800m, mile and two-mile).
In the winters in Sun Valley, she did both moguls skiing and cross-country skiing before ultimately focusing on the latter.
On Oct. 17, 2022, Smith was officially named to the U.S. cross-country skiing development team and scored two goals in a 13-minute span in her U.S. international soccer debut at the U-17 World Cup in India.
She traveled back from that event — 45 hours including stops, plus a 12.5-hour time zone change — went to one day of school, then drove five hours to Lewiston to help her team win the state cross-country running title.
GOA, INDIA – OCTOBER 17: Samantha Smith of USA is congratulated on scoring her teams third goal during the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup 2022 Group A match between USA and Morocco at Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on October 17, 2022 in Goa, India. (Photo by Matthew Lewis – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
Sammy Smith (6, middle) is congratulated after scoring in the 2022 U-17 World Cup. (FIFA via Getty Images)
In March 2023, Smith, still a high school junior, made her debut on cross-country skiing’s highest level — the World Cup — in Norway. She was the youngest woman in the field of 40 by two years.
In Smith’s third career World Cup race later that week, she made it to the quarterfinals of a sprint as one of 30 qualifiers from individual time trials.
She was sixth in a quarterfinal heat that included the reigning Olympic sprint gold medalist (Jonna Sundling of Sweden) and the world’s best overall cross-country skier that season (Tiril Udnes Weng of Norway).
This past February, Smith took silver in the sprint at the World Junior Cross-Country Skiing Championships. She became the third and youngest U.S. woman to win an individual medal in junior worlds history.
Then in March, she was paired to be roommates at the senior World Cup Finals with Jessie Diggins, the most decorated cross-country skier in U.S. history.
Smith got an up-close look at how Diggins handled the pressure of holding on to win the World Cup overall title in the last events of the 34-race season that began five months earlier.
“Seeing Jessie really embrace everything and interact so much with her teammates and still have that same lively and energetic personality that she’s known to have, it just really helped me put it into perspective: Winning is one thing, but it’s about being part of the team and staying true to your values,” Smith said.
Smith and Diggins also paraglided together in Italy last January. Then in June, Smith completed the Broken Arrow Skyrace, a 14-mile mountain-climbing and trail-running event in Palisades Tahoe, California. Diggins covered the same course the previous day, but did the loop three times for a total distance of nearly 43 miles for her annual “Big Stupid.”
“I’m a big adrenaline person, she’s a big adrenaline person,” Smith said.
Smith’s international cross-country skiing schedule this winter will hinge on her performance at the U.S. Championships in early January in Anchorage.
On the World Cup, she aspires to make a sprint semifinal for the first time, which means placing in the top 12. No U.S. male or female cross-country skier has ever finished that high in any individual World Cup race as a teenager. Smith turns 20 next September.
Already in this Olympic cycle, Smith has played in the U-17 World Cup in soccer, made her senior World Cup debut in cross-country skiing and matriculated at Stanford. A big goal is to cap the quadrennium at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Games.
“The Olympics have always been my dream,” she said, “so if I had the chance to go, that’d be pretty incredible.”
Eleven members of the 2014 U.S. Olympic cross-country skiing team, including its last active skier, reunited in Park City.
