HOUSTON (KIAH) — Kelsey Bing likes being the last line of defense. Especially for the Team USA field hockey team.
The 26-year-old Houston native helped Team USA qualify for the 2024 Olympics in Paris with an outstanding performance as a goalie at the FIH Hockey Olympic Qualifiers in January 2024.
“Our strength is our team culture. We have five values that we live out on a daily basis, which help unite the entire team,” Bing said. “And in the Olympic qualifiers, we had such a good defensive structure that we were able to outscore the other teams throughout every match, which ultimately led to our success. ”
Kelsey and her family spent the first few years of her life in Austin before moving to Houston. She started playing field hockey in middle school because she was required to play the sport every semester and her mother told her that field hockey was the most similar to soccer.
She went on to play at the high school level at St. John's School and then headed to Stanford to play at the collegiate level, where she also studied to become a software engineer.
When he's not stopping balls on the lawn, Bing works for a California startup testing autopilot programs for airplanes.
“X-Wing is a self-driving technology startup based in California. And our idea is to help create autonomous packages that can be installed on airplanes, and I am responsible for developing the software for the autopilot team. I’m an engineer,” Bing said. “That means I help build the physical model of the plane so we can run the tests on the computer, and I do some of the low-level controls.”
But Bing and his American teammates aren't ready to go back to regular work just yet. Having failed to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, they have some things to do in France.
“I think it's kind of hard when you get stuck thinking about failure, but I just think about it like, 'I may have failed at this event, but what can I learn from it?' “So, for me, I'm trying to be very focused now, as opposed to before. How can I move forward better?”
