6 minute read
Born to Fly
Born to Fly BY ADAM LUCAS PHOTOS COURTESY OF NICOLE FREY AND UNC ATHLETIC COMMUNICATIONS
A FORMER TAR HEEL FIELD HOCKEY PLAYER TURNED PILOT FOUND THE PERFECT CAREER IN THE NAVY
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When Karen Shelton was recruiting Nicole Frey to play field hockey at the University of North Carolina, one specific credential stood out on Frey’s list of accomplishments:
In fact, Frey was the first female to play varsity football in her hometown of Virginia Beach, and her game-winning field goal won the Virginia Beach city championship. After inking with the Tar Heels, she was a goalkeeper for the UNC field hockey team from 1995-99, a period in which she helped the program win three national championships and three Atlantic Coast Conference titles.
Frey loved her time as a college athlete and as a Tar Heel but wondered what her next step—what her next challenge—would be. Her father, United States Navy Capt. Charles Frey, consistently suggested she should try the military. His daughter consistently ignored him.
Shelton is the daughter of a World War II veteran who grew up in a military family. Her father, Jim Shelton, flew helicopters in Vietnam and served in the Army for 26 years. Much of Shelton’s competitiveness was created by challenging her two older brothers on athletic fields on military bases around the country. She knew how to recognize someone who would fit into the military environment.
But Frey showed little indication during her Carolina career that she wanted to pursue a military path. Instead, she took a job at Salomon Smith Barney straight out of college. Within months, she knew she’d made a mistake.
“I knew right away that I couldn’t sit behind a desk,” she says.
She continued to have conversations with her father, whose decorated military career had begun when he was drafted during the Vietnam War. He used the GI Bill to complete his education, and then went to Navy’s Officer Candidate School, eventually completing a 29-year career in the military.
“I always believed Nicole would be an excellent Naval officer,” Charles Frey says. “She was a young woman who was never afraid to step out of her comfort zone. She thrived under pressure and was always a team player focused on winning.”
His daughter’s response was immediate when Charles Frey asked what she wanted to do next: “I want to fly,” she said.
Capt. Frey made a contact with a recruiter in the Triangle area, who made contact with the prospective recruit. Within months, her office career was over and her military career had started.
She began with Officer Candidate School—as Shelton puts it, “the hard way to do it.” She was in the first class to arrive in Pensacola after Sept. 11, 2001. Everyone who participated was well aware that this wasn’t just a lark. This was a very real entry into a world that would soon include combat in some very unhospitable locations.
It was difficult, it was tiring, and it was a daily weed-out challenge to determine who was strong enough to stay.
And Frey loved it.
“I knew right away I had found what I wanted to do,” she says. “I was surrounded by motivated people who were all there for the same reasons. The discipline, the structure and everything I had
gotten from Carolina field hockey I started seeing in the military.”
Her flight career began with Introductory Flight School training, which gave her 25 hours of civilian instruction in a tiny Piper Tomahawk. Then she moved to Corpus Christi, Tex., and flew the T-34 single engine turboprop. As she excelled, the planes and the assignments got bigger—Frey has now flown a T-12 King Air, a P-3 Orion, an EP-3 Aries, a Metroliner SA-227, and the signature C-130s and Naval C-40s, a military version of Boeing’s 737.
In her new career, Frey found everything she’d been missing during her few months in the financial sector. She was constantly learning and training on new equipment. She and her husband, Scott, and their two children have traveled all over the world, and she’s currently stationed in Bahrain, a nation of 30 islands in the heart of the Persian Gulf.
In 2014, Frey transitioned from active duty to the Naval Reserve, which gave her the opportunity to fly 737s for Delta out of New York. Although the equipment is similar between her military and commercial flights, the preparation is very different. Military pilots do much of the planning, weather checks and flight clearances themselves, while commercial pilots primarily focus on actually flying the plane.
Frey has been back to Chapel Hill since graduation to speak at a regular symposium Shelton holds to expose her players to a wide range of careers. Frey recognizes the irony of a former Tar Heel who had no interest in the military while she was in Chapel Hill now returning to campus to talk to Tar Heels
about the finer points of a military career. But she also has over a decade of first-hand experience that taught her how closely the two programs correlate, and Shelton’s life experience means she wants her players to be aware of the possibilities.
“Being in the military and being in team sports develops selflessness and the discipline of team unity in accomplishing a mission,” Shelton says. “They train for very similar things. Nicole is the only player I’ve had who has gone into the military. It’s important for someone like her who has gone into an amazing career to let our student-athletes know that they would fit in with the military, because they’re already well trained in so many things that make you successful in that career.”
“Our core values with the military—honor, courage, integrity and commitment—are the same values Karen expected from her teams,” Frey says. “She wanted us to have the courage to get out there and keep trying even when we were down a goal. The same thing is true in the military, and everyone depends so heavily on everyone else just like we did on the field at Carolina. It’s amazing how different the two things are but also how many similarities they have.”
