Photo by David Leong.
Michael Stallings, who was the athletic director and head baseball coach at Chelsea High School until being named athletic director for the entire Shelby County school system, changes pitchers during Game 3 of the AHSAA 6A Baseball State Championship.
If it wasn’t for a torn muscle in his shoulder, it’s very possible that Michael Stallings wouldn’t be where he is today with the top sports job in Shelby County.
Stallings, who was named athletic director for Shelby County Schools earlier this month, was a pitcher at UAB when he tore his labrum muscle connecting his arm to his shoulder. With a redshirt senior year and his playing career on hiatus, then-coaches Larry Giangrosso and Lee Hall decided to give the Benjamin Russell standout a chance to continue contributing to the team.
“I was basically given the opportunity to be a coach with them, traveling with them and the team, and putting me in the situation to work with our pitchers,” Stallings said. “They said, ‘We want to find ways you can be a benefit.’”
Whether or not Giangrosso and Hall meant to, this changed everything for Stallings, who switched from a business major to education, looking for opportunities to lead the next generation of student-athletes as a coach.
It’s a philosophy he hopes to pass on as the newest athletic director at Shelby County, one of the largest school systems in Alabama with over 20,000 students.
“At the end of the day, that’s what we want from all of our coaches,” he said. “You want them to be role models, but you also want them to have an impact on the students they have the privilege to coach.”
Stallings has served as head baseball coach at Chelsea High School since 2009, where he also served as athletic director. Despite coming from a high school with a little over 1,200 students, Stallings said his own philosophy will not change in his new role at Shelby County.
“Ultimately, I think that in order to have success, you have to have a good foundation, and that foundation is built on great relationships,” he said. “I’ve had some good time to build relationships at Chelsea.”
As he and his staff get ready for the upcoming school year, Stallings hopes to build and improve upon the relationships between the different high school programs, as well as bridge the gap between high school and middle school athletic programs.
“Part of my vision is having meetings and other opportunities, whether it be through professional development or spending time building stronger relationships with all these schools,” he said. “To me, it’s about creating one program that has the same vision, is speaking the same language and is moving in the same direction.”
But more than just overseeing coaches and teams, Stallings wants to make sure that, with as many distractions as exist for young people today, sports continue to be a great path to success for student-athletes across Shelby County.
“It’s another level of accountability for them when they are on a team because they are held to a certain standard,” he said. “When they buy into that vision, they don’t want to mess up, they want to please and they want to be great.”
