This Maryland high school player profiles series is presented by the U.S. Army.

Mia Smith, a junior combo guard for the Clarksburg High School girls’ basketball team, was nominated for the Maryland high school player profiles series by Coyotes head coach Sissy Natoli.

“She’s been instrumental in the past couple years just leading us and being able to raise the level of our play,” Natoli said. “She has a great basketball IQ. An exciting, explosive player to watch. Just one of those talented athletes that’s truly a pleasure to watch her play. She’s exciting, and she’s also very unselfish, and she engages her teammates. She’s a very special kind of basketball player. It’s been fun to coach her.”

Smith has scored 774 points during her two seasons for the Cougars. If she eventually hits 1,000 points, she’d be the first in program history to reach that mark. Smith was team MVP as a sophomore, when she was a team captain. She shot better than 50 percent from the field to lead the team, and she also set the team’s pace in steals.

Smith answered a few questions about being nominated.

PressBox: What’s it mean for you to be selected by your coach like this?

Mia Smith: It means a lot to me, really, because there’s a lot of talented players on my team.

PB: How did you get into basketball, what do you love about the sport, and how did you become so good at it?

MS: Well, my dad [Steve Smith] played college basketball [at George Mason], and my brother, he’s a freshman in college this year, and growing up with him, I played a lot with him. Before I got on the team, I would go and practice with his teams, so I would practice with boys. And so, my brother pretty much inspired me to get really good at it and he always helped me practice to get better. So that’s kind of how I got where I was today.

PB: You led your team to a 20-5 record last year, best in school history. How special was it to achieve something like that as a team?

MS: It was really special, especially being the best Clarksburg record. Yeah, playing with my teammates, we have a really strong group of girls.

PB: You have a shot to become the first player in program history to reach 1,000 career points. What would that achievement mean to you?

MS: It would mean everything. It would really build my confidence to going to play college ball. It really shows me that my hard work paid off.

PB: Your team made it all the way to the Class 4A state quarterfinals in 2020. How much did that give you a taste of the next step to take as a team?

MS: It really opened up our eyes because, playing out of Montgomery County in the quarterfinals, we haven’t played like a PG team before. So just playing a different team with a different level of play [in Churchill], it was a very high competition game, very competitive. So, getting to play against that really showed us how much harder we need to work to get there again.

To nominate an athlete or team for a future U.S. Army Player/Team Profile, visit PressBoxOnline.com/Impact.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Mia Smith