NMOTC Sailor Wins Gold in Softball with Women’s All-Navy Softball Team
“We all came to win the gold, and as a team, we did just that! We will never forget that moment in our military careers!”
Naval Aircrewman (Avionics) 1st Class Haley Stallings, a member of the women’s All-Navy softball team, won gold with her team in the Armed Forces cup. This is the first gold for the Navy women’s team since 1985.
Stallings is currently stationed at Aviation Survival Training Center (ASTC) Pensacola where she serves as an aviation survival instructor and the operations leading petty officer (LPO). ASTC Pensacola is a training site under the Naval Survival Training Institute (NSTI), one of six detachments of the Navy Medicine Operational Training Command (NMOTC).
Introduced to softball early in her childhood, Stallings’ journey to gold started long before her military career.
“I have been playing softball since I was about 10,” said Stallings. “I was the only child in my household and I loved playing sports with the neighborhood kids. I begged my mom to sign me up for softball and I have had a love for it ever since. After high school, I joined the military and when I got to my first command I started playing slow pitch with my squadron.”
But pursuing such a passion while on arduous sea duty is not an easy task.
“The first six years of my career, I spent stationed at Tinker Air Force Base flying in the E6-B Mercury, accumulating almost 1600 flight hours and deployed 719 days,” said Stallings. “There was hardly any time to play ball. The 2021 season was my first year on the Navy team.”