Laura Smith doesn’t believe in coincidences. To her way of thinking, some things – like the fact she happens to be a speech-language pathologist, while her 5-year-old daughter happens to have a relatively rare speech disorder – seem too neat to be nothing more than mere happenstance.

It is perhaps because Smith believes this that she was willing to take action when she saw a series of events (the kind of events another type of person might dismiss as coincidences) seemingly guiding her to a Denver bookstore where UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey was signing copies of her memoir, “My Fight/Your Fight,” one night this past May.

That’s when Smith’s action prompted Rousey’s action, which may very well in turn prompt other people’s actions, which is how the ripples of one person’s life reach out into the lives of others.

The story goes like this: With the day off from work and the quiet house afforded by children who, for the moment, were refraining from fighting with one another, Smith found herself clicking around the Internet, like you do when you have the luxury of time to waste. She saw a headline that referred to “the most dangerous woman in the world,” along with a picture of Rousey in a sleek dress, and the sheer incredulity of the contrast was enough to get her to click through.

Smith knew nothing about MMA or the UFC. She’d heard the initials before, she said, “but I thought it was a part of the WWE or something.”

She had no clue who Rousey was or where she’d come from, but as she read the fighter’s story, she found herself hooked by some familiar details. The childhood speech disorder Rousey described sounded like one Smith knew well. It sounded, in fact, like apraxia of speech, the same disorder Smith’s daughter has.

So she typed Rousey’s name into Google then started reading everything she could find, searching for more information on Rousey’s struggle to speak, scanning the interviews to see if Rousey ever used the word apraxia. She learned that Rousey had suffered hypoxia – an oxygen deficiency – at birth, due to the umbilical cord becoming wrapped around her throat. That lack of oxygen to the brain is now known as one of the three main causes of apraxia, which seemed to only bolster the case in Smith’s mind.

Smith asked the members of her Facebook group about childhood apraxia if they knew who Rousey was, and whether she’d had apraxia. People knew of her, but most didn’t know she’d ever had a speech disorder, they said. Smith became, she can admit, a little bit obsessed.

“Hearing the way she described it in interviews,” Smith said, “I thought that’s what it had to be, because it’s really the only speech disorder where kids are fighting to speak, struggling just to speak. The sad reality is, if they don’t get that frequent and intense speech therapy early on, they often don’t become intelligible speakers as adults. That’s why awareness is so important.”

It’s also why Smith wanted verification from Rousey. If she had overcome apraxia to become not only an incredibly successful pro athlete who shines in interviews and on-camera appearances, but also a budding movie star, that was the kind of thing people needed to know. Especially the people with apraxia, and the parents of kids with it, who often wonder whether their children will ever speak well enough to lead normal lives.

Smith searched for ways to contact Rousey. She noticed the fighter’s active social media presence, but also noticed how many followers she had, which made it seem unlikely that any effort to reach out to her would get through. She went to Rousey’s website and sent her an email, she said, “but I knew that would go nowhere.”

Then she took a closer look at one of the stories that discussed Rousey’s book. It included the schedule for her book tour, along with dates and locations for each Rousey signing. There, near the bottom, was Denver, where Smith lives. The date was May 29.

“That’s when I realized, wait, that’s today,” Smith said. Another non-coincidence, as far as she was concerned.

Smith called the bookstore, only to learn that there were 500 tickets available for that day’s signing, and they were almost gone. You had to buy the book to get a ticket, which Smith gladly did, making her ticketholder No. 422. She canceled her daughter’s speech-therapy session and swimming lesson for the night, grabbed her daughter and an apraxia brochure, and went down to the store to meet the champion of an organization she didn’t know in a sport she didn’t follow.

Once she got there, Smith said, the experience was somewhat intimidating. There were grown men in line, seemingly freaking out at the thought of meeting this woman, who was flanked by bodyguards and a team of people who seemed to be losing their patience with the whole affair. When it was Smith’s turn, she sent her daughter, Ashlynn, up alone. Rousey asked the little girl her name, but because of Ashlynn’s apraxia, couldn’t understand the response. That’s when Smith stepped in, and also when she willed herself to bring up apraxia.

As Smith would later write in a blog post about the encounter: “Ronda stopped signing, looked me in the eye and said, ‘What did you just say?’”

That seemed like as good a time as any to bring out the brochure.

“I told her that, if she thought this was what she had, it would help a lot of people if she mentioned it in an interview or something,” Smith said, “because it would mean a lot to those people struggling with it to know that she did too. It helps them see that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

That’s the sort of help Rousey and her family didn’t necessarily get. Apraxia wasn’t fully recognized and documented as a speech disorder until 2007, Smith said. When Rousey was dealing with it as a child in the late 1980s and early 1990s, doctors didn’t necessarily know what to call it.

As Rousey’s mother AnnMaria De Mars recalled, doctors weren’t even in agreement that there was anything wrong with her daughter. As one pediatrician told her, maybe it was a consequence of her family speaking two languages – English and Spanish – at home. Maybe Rousey was just taking longer than normal to learn to speak, and it would work itself out.

“I always wondered about that,” DeMars told MMAjunkie, “because if she had been my first child, I probably would have accepted that and gone, ‘OK, she’ll eventually just figure it out.’ But you know, I had two older kids, and they both talked perfectly fine by the time they were 2. I knew something was wrong.”

Here’s the point in the story where it seems like Rousey was uncommonly lucky to have DeMars for a mother. While some parents might have accepted the non-diagnosis and hoped for the best, DeMars was insistent that her daughter needed intensive speech therapy, and several times a week.

That, according to Smith, is exactly what kids with apraxia have to have. If they don’t get it early on, it can affect the rest of their lives.

DeMars was so intent on it that she zeroed in on a teaching job at Minot State University, which was and still is known for its communication-disorders program.

“That was one of the things that, when I was interviewing there, I specifically asked about, was if Ronda could get speech therapy services there, and more than once a week,” DeMars said. “When I talked to the woman who was the head of the clinic there, I said, ‘I really need the best speech pathologist you’ve got.’ She said, ‘Oh, they’re all good.’ I told her, ‘Look, this is my baby we’re talking about here.’”

In the end, the head of the clinic began working with Rousey herself, after DeMars accepted a job teaching statistics in the graduate education program. It likely made a drastic difference in Rousey’s ability to overcome her speech disorder, but even years later, when she first competed in the Olympics, Rousey didn’t fully trust her own speaking ability.

“She’d always say, ‘Please Mom, don’t make me do it,’” DeMars said. “She didn’t want to talk to the press, didn’t want to be interviewed, because it made her so nervous. She still had trouble getting the words to come out.”

According to DeMars, you can still find old photos or videos of interviews with Rousey in which she seems to have one hand behind her back. That’s because she was holding onto her sister, Maria Burns-Ortiz, who acted not only as a support system, but also an occasional interpreter when Rousey got too flustered. It wasn’t so different from childhood, when Rousey’s two older sisters would speak for her at times when no one else could understand her.

When it came time to write Rousey’s book, DeMars said, Maria’s experience as a journalist made her a natural fit for the project.

“That’s why Ronda would always joke, ‘My whole life, Maria has talked for me,’” DeMars said. “It’s true in many ways.”

But the book brings us back to Smith, standing there with her daughter and her apraxia brochure. All she wanted, she said, was for Rousey to mention it in an interview, something to give apraxia sufferers and their families hope. Rousey did one better, posting the brochure to her Facebook page, which has been liked by nearly 7 million people so far.

It might seem like a small thing, but to Smith it meant a lot. Her daughter is still too young to fully understand what it means to have Rousey as a role model for overcoming apraxia, she said, though she knows enough to get excited when she sees her on TV. But for older kids – and just as important, their parents – Rousey’s example is exactly the sort of encouragement they need.

“One friend I have in the community has an 11-year-old son, and she said he saw her on ‘Good Morning America,’ and just kept rewinding the DVR to watch it again and again,” Smith said. “It makes me want to cry, because he was doing that and realizing, ‘I can speak like this one day.’ That’s huge for him. It’s also huge for the parents.

“With apraxia, a lot of people look at our kids and think they aren’t in there. They’re pegged as cognitively delayed. I have a client whose well-meaning friend was talking about her son being ‘mentally retarded.’ Now she can say, ‘Look, he has apraxia. And do you know who Ronda Rousey is? Yeah, that’s what he has.’ That’s incredibly powerful. We don’t have to explain it anymore. We can just say, ‘It’s a speech disorder, like Ronda Rousey had.’ And everybody knows who Ronda Rousey is right now.”

Smith’s post about the encounter initially reached only the couple hundred or so people who normally read her blog. In August, after Rousey’s most recent title defense at UFC 190, the number of readers for that post suddenly grew – and continued to grow.

“I watched as it went to 10,000, then 20,000, then 40,000,” Smith said. “It was crazy.”

The other thing that happened in August was that Smith, who had never watched an MMA event in her life, ordered her first UFC pay-per-view. So did many of her clients and friends in the apraxia community, she said. Since apraxia often coexists with autism, Rousey’s story has reached into that community too, according to Smith, “so now Ronda has all these new fans who never followed this sport before.”

As for Smith, who only recently learned that the UFC was not, in fact, an off-shoot of the WWE?

“I follow it now, baby,” she said.