She grew up in Long Beach, California, the daughter of Cuban and Puerto Rican parents, and learned the game in a family environment where competition was taken seriously from early on. Her father Ralph coached her through her development and remained closely involved in her career. She arrived at UCLA as a pitcher of exceptional raw ability and left as something more refined: a competitor whose preparation and game intelligence had caught up to her physical gifts, which had already been considerable. Her rise ball and drop ball combination gave hitters two problems that moved in opposite directions, and she threw both with enough command to work either side of the plate. She retired from Team USA after the 2004 Athens Games and transitioned into coaching, eventually joining the UCLA staff and later becoming the program's head coach, returning to the place where her playing career had been built.

She married former UCLA athlete Charles Smith and they have children together. Her post-playing career in coaching has kept her inside the sport at the highest collegiate level, and she has spoken at length about what it means to return to UCLA in a different capacity, the weight of the program's history and her own place in it. The move from player to head coach at the same institution is not common at the elite level, and it situates her career within a single program across multiple decades in a way that is unusual in any sport.