Gabrielle Reece

ESPN recently dubbed Gabrielle Reece, a Women’s Beach Volleyball League star, one of the world’s sexiest athletes. Gabrielle, also known as Gabby, possesses a look that conveys both athleticism and feminine beauty. At 6’3”, Gabby is a dominate force on and off the pro beach volleyball circuit. She competed when five months pregnant in the summer of 2007, inspiring women to stay in shape during their pregnancy.

Gabby is currently the creator and host of The HoneyLine (2008), a fast-paced, magazine-style broadcast that delivers realistic solutions to women’s questions concerning style, health & fitness, relationship challenges in the home, food and the environment. Gabby enlists the help of her celebrity friends through one-on-one interviews getting the detailed answers to these modern day questions. The HoneyLine segments can be found on The Rachael Ray Show.

Passionate about fitness, Gabby recently released and produced her own health & fitness products: “Bell Express 15” Workout Kits, “Gabrielle Reece Fit & Healthy Prenatal Workouts” DVDs and “Gabrielle Reece: The Complete Fit & Healthy Pregnancy Workout” 2 DVD set. The “Bell Express 15” Workout Kits take the time-crunched consumer through five different targeted workouts including Strength, Cardio, Fit n’ Slim, Core Training and 30 Day Challenge. The “Gabrielle Reece Fit & Healthy Prenatal Workouts” are month-by-month first and second trimester pregnancy workouts that can be done in fifteen minute segments. The “Gabrielle Reece: The Complete Fit & Healthy Pregnancy Workout” goes one step further, covering all three trimesters and the three months post-partum. “One of my missions is to find realistic ways to help busy women who have little time to take better care of themselves…If you do this program, not only will you feel and look better, but you will be doing something beneficial for yourself and your baby,” says Gabby. The prenatal workouts and “Bell Express 15” Kits hit retailers January 2008, and the pregnancy workouts hit retailers September 2008. Workout kits and DVDs can be found on Gabby’s fitness site www.theHoneyLine.com and on Amazon.com.

Gabby recently signed on as a spokesperson for Simply Nutrilite for a line of vitamins and supplements as part of a national effort to help the contemporary mom make practical choices for her on-the-go, active lifestyle. Gabby says, “With a hectic schedule that includes three children, it’s not always easy to have full healthy meals everyday. Simply Nutrilite products are the sure option for quick and better nutrition.” These vitamins and supplements and Gabby’s health and fitness tips are available on her website and on her Yahoo Health page.

Gabby’s fitness tips can also be found on the pages of Shape magazine where she is a monthly contributing editor. She can also be seen hosting ‘Insider Training’ on the FitTV/Discovery channel, where she gives an inside look at professional athletes’ exercise regimens and what they eat (www.fittv.discovery.com/fansites/insidertraining). Gabby garnered attention on ABC’s ‘8 Simple Rules’ (2005) and as a featured host on ESPN and NBC’s “Gravity Games”. She won a huge following by taking risks road-luging, white water kayaking, drag racing, surfing, and sky diving on “MTV Sports” and “The Extremists with Gabrielle Reece” in the 90’s, and she was a commentator at the 1998 Goodwill Games.

Gabby’s skills cross over onto the big screen where she played a pro beach volleyball player in ‘Cloud Nine’ with Bert Reynolds (2004), a guest star in ‘North Shore’ (2004) and as a physical trainer in the film ‘Gattica’ (1997). She’s graced the cover of Sports Illustrated for Women, Travel & Leisure Golf, Women’s Sports & Fitness, Outside, Elle, Shape, Self, Harpers’ Bazaar, Volleyball, Fitness, Life, Vogue, Experience Life and People.

She was Nike’s first female athlete to design a shoe, and Nike’s first-ever female cross-training spokesperson (1993-99). Working with Tinker Hatfield, designer of the Air Jordan, Nike Launched Gabby’s shoe the Air Trainer Set in 1994, the Air Patrol in 1995, the first women’s shoe to outsell men’s and outsell the Air Jordan, the Air GR in 1997 and the Air GR II in 1998.

She trained hard to hone her skills in 2-person beach volleyball and competed domestically in the 1999-2000 Olympic Challenge Series and the 1999-2000 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour. In 1997, competing with the best global beach volleyball players ever assembled, Gabby’s 4-person team took first place at the first-ever Beach Volleyball World Championships. 1997 was Gabby’s fifth season as a team captain in the 4-person Women’s Beach Volleyball League (WBVL), and her fourth captaining Team Nike, which shared League Co-Championship. Named the Offensive Player of the Year in 1994-95 and WBVL blocks leader, Gabby led the WBVL in kills four straight years in a row from 1993-1996. Gabby, A Florida State star turned pro, says, “I enjoy getting the ball to go exactly where I want it, at the speed I want it to go.”

Women’s Sports & Fitness named Gabby one of the ‘20 Most Influential Women in Sports’ (August 1997). Regarding their choice of Gabby for the issue’s cover, the magazine’s editor wrote, “Because I believe she represents, finally, the answer to all the image-questing pendulum swinging of the decades gone by. Who is the female athlete? She is everything once thought to be an inherent contradiction. She is strong and beautiful, sweaty and feminine, tough and ladylike.” She also wrote a column for the Conde Nast’s magazine and was a contributing editor at Elle magazine. Gabby opened up about her rise to the top in the book, “Big Girl in the Middle,” which she co-wrote that year with Karen Karbo and which was published by Crown.

California born, Gabby is a mix of her mother from Long Island, her height comes from her mother, and her father from Trinidad who died when she was five. Her trademark piece of jewelry, copied on a tattoo inside her right ankle, is a stylized sterling silver cross worn by her father. Raised on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, Gabby didn’t take up volleyball until in the 11th grade when she and her mother moved to St. Petersburg, Florida. Gabby won an athletic scholarship to Florida State University where she majored in Communications and played two seasons of volleyball before accepting offers from the modeling world in New York. She was only a sophomore at Florida State University when Elle named her “One of The Five Most Beautiful Women in The World”. Despite the allure of high paying modeling jobs, Gabby returned to the FSU campus and set two school volleyball records in solo blocks (240) and total blocks (747). Both records still stand today. In 1997, Florida State University inducted Gabby into the college’s Athletic Hall of Fame.