NFL alum Jason Smith was named earlier this year to his alma mater Baylor University’s Athletics Hall of Fame.
Smith was selected by the Rams as the second overall pick in the 2009 NFL Draft. He had been an All-America tackle his final year at Baylor. As happened to many of us, his four-year pro career with the Rams and Jets was hampered by injuries. However, Smith had another passion that has stayed with him to this day.
“When we were young,” the 34-year old Smith says, “our grandmother lived across the street from us and she introduced us to horseback riding in Dallas. She worked full-time at the Baylor Medical Center but she volunteered on Sundays at a concession stand at a horse arena called the Hog Pen. My brother and I would go with her and we’d bring up the cattle, work the gate, and warm-up horses for people. We were around horses a great deal but we still lived in the inner city.”
When Smith later attended Baylor, there was one other constant in his life in addition to football and academics.
“Through pretty much my whole college career,” he explains, “I was over my friend’s ranch on Sundays…riding, roping, and competing. Of course, during the football season, I would just go over and watch so I wouldn’t get hurt.”
Smith and his wife Dacie now own the Twin Lakes Arena in Fairfield, about 90 miles south of Dallas. The Arena is a breeding and training program for high-quality performance horses. They also own and raise barrel and rope horses. In addition, the couple started Big Boy Ranch Treatment, a trucking company that services oil field operations in Louisiana.
This 2020 pandemic year has been challenging for the Smith’s as it has for nearly all of us.
“The coronavirus helped us solidify what we’re doing and who we are,” says the father of two young children. “You had to start from the ground up, take it one day at a time, one step at a time. I like to run before I walk so I just take off running. Maybe I’ll be the only one and get ahead of everybody. In business, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s just like life. Everything this year has been a learning curve, a growing process.”
We at NFL Alumni wish Jason and Dacie Smith only success in their current ventures in Texas. Jason started as a young man at the bottom and we congratulate him for making a business out of his youthful avocations.
