Bill Little commentary: The littlest Longhorn
June 18, 2009
Bill Little, Texas Media Relations OMAHA, Neb. -- She's been mistaken for one of the player's little sisters, or one of the coaches' kids. She weighs something less than 100 pounds, can stretch to 5-feet-2, and she does have eyes of gun-metal blue. But those who know the recently graduated Longhorn student Baseball trainer will give you one piece of advice: Don't mess with Jessica Yanta. As the Longhorns practiced on their second off-day, waiting for Friday night's bracket championship game, Jessica and three student managers -- the unsung heroes of any team -- put in another day's work as well. Jessica, along with brothers Travis and Tyler Wright and John Mardirosian, are part of a small army of support staff students who spend a lot of time and effort working with every sport at Texas, earning degrees and going out to make a difference in the world, just as they have for the coaches and athletes whom they have served. Travis Wright, this year's senior manager, has graduated with honors, and it is Jessica's story which has captured the interest of the television cameras and the fans at Rosenblatt Stadium. She is the classic story of one who has never let anything stand in her way. In fact, one of the few times she had ever been beaten came at birth, when she was the last triplet born to Mary Jane and Allen Yanta of Lampasas, Tex., on Christmas Eve a little more than 20 years ago. But, considering the early arrival of the three sisters resulted in a C-section birth, she was only a couple of minutes behind. Jessica will frown when she tells you she only graduated fourth in her high school class of several hundred, and even seems a bit frustrated to admit to a graduating GPA at Texas of 3.95, summa cum laude in kinesiology with a specialty in athletics training. She has been a shining light in the young program, which began five years ago as an accredited program for students interested in entering the field professionally.
Jessica has won the "Pride" award for the best GPA in the program for three straight years, during which time she has served as a student trainer for Volleyball, Men's Tennis, Women's Track and Field, club soccer, Spring Football and, finally this spring, Baseball. She came naturally to the field because of a love of athletics and an interest in anatomy as a high school student in Lampasas, where older brother Brett, who attended UT in the early `90s, had "brainwashed" her about the Texas Longhorns. Do not, those who know her will warn you, let her size deceive you. The competitor that burns inside her once threw her tennis racket when she lost a friendly match to her teammate on the Lampasas High tennis team (she lettered four years in tennis), but she swears that was the only time she did that. At practice on Thursday, she was busy stretching 6-4 Austin Dicharry, a skill she had perfected while working with the volleyball team. "Some of the girls' legs seemed like they were longer than I was tall," she says. "So I learned to just use my whole body to get in position to help them stretch." Conquering an image is not always easy, so Jessica just used her competitiveness to overcome a self-admitted serious case of shyness when she first got into the program. It was one of those deals where the goal was worth the price of overcoming the fear, which, ironically, is something that Augie Garrido stresses to his team. "At first I had to act confident, even if I wasn't," Jessica says. "Fake it `til you make it. But it got better and better when the athletes began to understand that I knew what I was doing, and they began to listen to me." That was a skill learned early, because life as a triplet proved both interesting and challenging for the three little girls whose parents were both teachers. "At least we had somebody to play with," Jessica says of her sisters Mary Beth and Allison. "But I don't know that they liked that I always wanted to play like I was a teacher and make them my students." At Texas, Jessica looked first at biology and then nutrition as a major before migrating to the combination of athletics and training, and while she's a fitness fanatic who eats healthy, she still will tell anybody who will listen that if you are passing through Lampasas, you darn sure better stop at Storm's for a hamburger and fries special with cheese. It will be awhile before she can spend much time in that part of the Texas Hill Country, however, because as soon as the NCAA Mens's College World Series is over, Jessica is preparing to enter a 33-month select program in physical therapy at Texas Women's University in Houston. Her dream is to one day work as a head athletics trainer at a university. "I just enjoy working with the combination of athletics and competition, where people are motivated to get better," she says. Work in Jessica's life comes from the roots, and her idol is probably her inspirational 92-year-old grandmother, Louise Yanta, who still runs a 2,000 acre ranch near Karnes City. Jessica's Dad was 7 when Louise's husband died. "She's amazing," says Jessica. "She is smaller than I am. She is really tiny. But that has never stopped her. She raised those kids and ran the ranch all by herself. We still go there every Thanksgiving and Christmas, and she insists on doing all of the cooking and she won't let us help at all." Inspiration is a word that seems to come to mind when you consider Jessica, and all of those students who have worked as trainers and managers with Longhorn athletics for many, many years. Among their number are doctors, corporate executives, lawyers, Marine officers, and many of those who chose to work as trainers continue to do just that in professional sports, high school sports and colleges. As for Jessica, the little girl in the dugout who may seem to be too tiny to carry a water cooler, she comes up really big in her quest for life, and in the job that she does. In her own way, she has touched more Longhorn athletes, with her hands and with her heart, than many will have a chance to do in a life time. Jessica, a female trainer working with men's sports, is part of a growing number of women in the profession. And for the old timers at Texas, there is also a particular irony in the power of somebody her size. One of the pioneers of athletics training, a man who worked with Olympic teams and became a legend at The University of Texas, was a Cherokee Indian named Frank Medina. Like Jessica, he bravely came into a field where the athletes with whom he worked were a lot bigger than he was. But with his mind and his wisdom, he won their confidence. And by the way, he was five feet tall, two inches shorter than Jessica. |
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