JULY 12, 2024 — Zelinda Camacho has played softball for as long as she can remember.
Four years old, to be exact, is when she 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.
“I 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.
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, meaning that she was already a senior when she started classes.
“I 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.”
“What I enjoy about Zelinda is that she truly has a teacher’s heart.”
Camacho arrived at UTSA around the same time that Vann Stuedeman was named the head softball coach for UTSA Athletics, and was putting her first team together.
One day, Camacho got the phone call she wasn’t expecting from Stuedeman, asking if she wanted to join the Roadrunners softball team.
The call came while Camacho was at the doctor’s office with her father, Ricardo Camacho.
“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 is pursuing a degree in elementary education. She credits her sister, Lucina Garcia, who is 10 years her senior, for inspiring her.
“She’s a big role model and one of my biggest supporters,” Camacho said. “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. I chose teaching because I want 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 the locker room.
“What I enjoy about Zelinda is that she truly has a teacher’s heart,” Stuedeman said. “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.”
Her first year with the team came with some challenges — including a class schedule that did not line up with team practices and strength and conditioning sessions. Instead, she worked on pitching with Stuedeman early in the mornings and then individual strength-training with Sophia Kennedy, the team’s sports performance coach, later in the day.
Now in her second year, Camacho will participate in student teaching to fulfill her educational requirements and prepare for her future career.
“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,” said Stuedeman, who praises Camacho’s dedication to the sport and to her future career.
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 proudly say, ‘I am a Roadrunner.’”
