WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Scott Fortune
As a player, he helped the U.S. win two Olympic medals. As a financial adviser, he’s helping USAV put resources in place to win future medals
SCOTT FORTUNE PLAYED IN THREE OLYMPICS AND THEN just kept right on going as a fan. Since hanging up his USA jersey after the Atlanta Games in 1996, he attended four consecutive Olympics through the 2012 London Games. It wasn’t always easy, either. He and his wife, Jana, have two daughters:
Sydney, 15, and Shelby, 13. Eight years ago, the whole family went to Beijing, and they flew back the night before Shelby started kindergarten. “She slept through half the class on her first day of school,” Fortune, 50, says with a laugh. Whatever scheduling challenges the trips have presented, it’s been
well worth it to Fortune, whose warm feelings for the Olympics extend beyond his own history as a gold and bronze medalist. “It’s a wonderful thing, especially for those sports that aren’t the tier-one sports,” he says. “The world tunes in – especially in the United States – for vol- leyball, gymnastics, these great sports that the athletes put their hearts into. And this is their one shining moment.” Now a portfolio manager and research analyst for an investment firm in San Diego and the president of the USA Volleyball Foundation, Fortune was in the first genera- tion of bigger outside hitters at 6-6, and he had shining moments of his own during his playing career. The brightest was undoubt- edly match point in the 1988 Olympic Games gold-medal match against the Soviets. He still had a year to go at Stanford, and he was a rookie on a team full of volleyball stars: Karch Kiraly, Steve Timmons and Craig Buck, to name a few. U.S. Olympic Men’s Team Head Coach Marv Dunphy would routinely sub Fortune in to play back row. This time, when Fortune got to the front row, Dunphy left him in. Eric Sato ripped a jump serve, the Soviets passed it over the net, and – POW! – Fortune spiked it to the floor to clinch the gold. “That point was like something in a
movie,” he says. “It seemed like it took the ball forever to get there.” A year later, he led Stanford to the NCAA championship match, and there’s a pretty good back story here. In high school, he was recruited to UCLA by Al Scates, who retired in 2012 with a record 19 NCAA volleyball titles. “When I told him I was going to Stanford, he said, ‘Well, that’s
too bad. You’ll never win an NCAA championship,’” Fortune says, his smile widening. “That always stuck with me. We won the gold medal in the Olympics, and then in 1989, my senior year, we were in the finals playing UCLA at UCLA. I was going for the trifecta. We’d won in high
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Scott Fortune, an Olympic gold medalist from 1988, has helped USA Volleyball establish a strong financial foothold and thrive as a national governing body. Photo: Peter Brouillet
school (three championships at Laguna Beach High), won the gold. And then we lost to UCLA.” If he narrowly missed the trifecta back then, you might say that he has since completed it by providing nearly two decades of sound financial guidance for USA Volleyball. After starting on the 1992 bronze medal team in Barcelona as team captain and playing again at the 1996 Atlanta Games, Fortune began serving on the USAV Audit, Finance and Budget committee that had to tell employees to “start counting your pencils and paper clips.” Over time, the committee helped USAV restore fiscal stability, and its annual operating budget has grown from around $6 million in the late 1990s to more than $30 million. As president of the USA Volleyball Foundation,
which develops monetary support for growth and development of the sport, Fortune has overseen a near tripling of the cash reserves during the past decade. His goal now is to push the foundation’s current balance of $3.5 million to over $10 mil- lion. With funds at that level, bigger projects could be taken on – like building a training center in Southern California with housing for elite-level athletes. USA Volleyball CEO Doug Beal says the Foun- dation finances have been left in Fortune’s hands even though the United States Olympic Commit- tee will manage any NGB’s assets. “We’ve chosen not to transfer the assets to the
USOC, partially because we are so confident in Scott and how carefully he researches and how suc- cessful we’ve been,” Beal says. The Fortune family decided not to go to Rio
this summer, so Scott didn’t see the Olympics live for the first time in decades. But he followed every match on TV, often watching the live stream at work on one of his three computers. Two screens
had the stock market, the other had volleyball. Even from afar, the Olympics still touches Fortune like no other
sporting event. “Once you’ve been in the Olympics, you know that feeling – that ex-
citement,” Fortune says. “And it’s just neat from my standpoint to watch the next generation of great players and to see how far USA Volleyball has come. Along with Brazil, we’re now the top program in the world.” — Don Patterson
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