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Professional volleyball champion

Gabrielle Reece is a volleyball player, model, and commercial spokesperson who is staking a claim in the publishing world. As a student at Florida State University, Reece majored in communications, and the education has come in handy. Reece wrote articles for Elle magazine, and in 1997 she began a regular feature column in Sports for Women, a magazine for female athletes.

In 1997 Reece released her biography, Big Girl in the Middle. Co-authored with Karen Karbo, Big Girl in the Middle explores the personal and professional life of the multi-talented Reece. Describing a challenge that women athletes face, Reece observes in Big Girl: "Everything a woman does has an emotional component. Paying attention to my emotional side without surrendering is one of the toughest parts of playing professional sports." Reece also explains that her prowess as an athlete was hard earned, but she credits the hard work for giving her a strong character. "And it's the same for all girls who choose to play sports. The discomfort inflicted...taps into her character, forces her to grow."

The breadth of Reece's talents is as imposing as her height (six feet, three inches tall). Although her literary voice is growing, the central focus of her career remains athletics, an activity from which she draws powerful benefits. "For girls," she writes in Big Girl, "it's especially good for them to be forced to work as a team with other girls...it forces them to deal with unpleasant, ungracious emotions and get over it. It forces girls to rely on each other. It gives them confidence in other girls."

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