Tarni Stepto is an Australian female

softball Softball is a game similar to baseball played with a larger ball on a smaller field. Softball is played competitively at club levels, the college level, and the professional level. The game was first created in 1887 in Chicago by George Hanc ...

Olympian. She was born in

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

, NSW, Australia in 1999.

Early life

Stepto was born into a sports-crazed family. She started playing softball when very young. Her sister was a pitcher so she decided to try pitching as well and was very good at it, She made her junior national team debut as a teenager and was selected to her first NSW team in 2015. In 2017 she was crowned the Most Valuable Player at the U17 National Championships. She was also selected as the Best Pitcher and Best Player of the Grand Final awards. In 2018, in her first year in the Australian senior side, she participated in the Pacific Cup. She was then selected in the Championship squad. Stepto's inspiration was her fellow Kamilaroi woman and Tokyo 2020 teammate Stacey Porter.

Achievements

In order to experience the American collegiate softball game, Stepto enrolled at the

Oregon State University Oregon State University (OSU) is a public land-grant, research university in Corvallis, Oregon. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate-degree programs along with a variety of graduate and doctoral degrees. It has the 10th largest engineering co ...

. In her first year she was made the Scenic West Athletic Conference Pitcher of the Year. Stepto was selected for the Australian women's national softball team at the

2020 Summer Olympics The , officially the and also known as , was an international multi-sport event held from 23 July to 8 August 2021 in Tokyo, Japan, with some preliminary events that began on 21 July. Tokyo was selected as the host city during the ...

. The team came away with one win out of five, beating Italy 1–0 in their second match of the

Round Robin Round-robin may refer to: Computing * Round-robin DNS, a technique for dealing with redundant Internet Protocol service hosts * Round-robin networks, communications networks made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology * Round-robin schedu ...

and finished fifth overall. Stepto pitched against the United States.

References

1999 births Living people Australian softball players Softball players at the 2020 Summer Olympics Olympic softball players for Australia Softball players from Sydney {{Australia-softball-bio-stub