Katie Holloway is a consistent perfomer in big matches, but the closeness of the U.S. Women’s Sitting National Team off the court is a big part of the team’s success.


many: When Madelyn was a baby, Webster would sometimes bring her to the gym for practice and hire a teenage babysitter to watch her. If Mad- elyn cried, Webster did her best to block it out, but “I could only ignore it for 15 minutes or so before I’d need to excuse myself and go step in,” she says. “The poor babysitter is sitting there with a crying baby. At some point, you have to go help.” Even with unusual training challenges – “I wouldn’t tell my husband that I was serving against the living room wall, but I did,” she says with a laugh – Webster evolved into a world-class middle blocker. In a sitting career spanning nearly 14 years, she has won four Paralympic medals – gold in Rio, silvers in London (2012) and Beijing (2008) and a bronze at Athens in 2004 – and was selected “Best Blocker” in Rio. And last spring she got the attention of two-time Olympian and TV


broadcaster Kevin Barnett in the USA Volleyball Open National Champi- onships sitting volleyball division held in Orlando, Florida. Knee injuries from Barnett’s indoor career prevent him from playing standing, and he retired from the national team in 2005. So he took up the sitting game at Hamiter’s urging. Barnett and Holloway play on the same sitting team, and Webster found herself across the net from him in Orlando. She blocked him a couple of times, and he looked across the net and said, “Hey, you’re a good blocker.” She didn’t recognize him at first, but when she realized later that he was an Olympian, she found him and thanked him for the compliment. “It was really cool that he thought I was a good blocker,” she says. “I’m


very proud of that.”


I’’ve told Bill (Hamiter) that if I’m going to make it to Tokyo that I’ve got to have some type of in-between life. It might get (hectic) again just before Tokyo, but this year and the year after have to be some level in between. — Katie Holloway


“ 50 | VOLLEYBALLUSA • Digital Issue at usavolleyball.org/mag ”


Proud also describes what Webster’s 8-year-old nephew, Jack, felt when his aunt and her teammates won the gold in Rio. Not long after she re- turned, she was with him at the park. He pointed to a woman they didn’t know and said, “Did you tell her you won a gold medal?” Lora smiled and said, “No, honey, she doesn’t care.” He smiled back and said, “You should tell her!”


Working to play Holloway, an outside hitter/opposite who was born without a right fibula and had the lower part of her leg amputated before she was two- years-old, was chosen Best Spiker at the 2012 London Paralympics, where the U.S. won a silver medal. She then moved from Oklahoma to Cali- fornia to begin her job as a recreation therapist. Up to that point in her life, the native of Lake Stevens, Washington, had what you would call a fully structured sports career. She played basketball in college at Cal State Northridge – she was the only player with a prosthetic in the history of NCAA Division I women’s basketball and was the Big West Conference’s Sixth Woman of the Year twice – and then joined the U.S. Women’s Sit- ting Team and lived and trained as a resident athlete in Oklahoma. In California, most of the structure disappeared. “When I was living in Oklahoma, it was pretty easy,” she says. “And playing college basketball, you go to practice and the environment is built in for you. When I came back to California, I moved into a completely new community. I only knew one person, and that was the person who helped me get the job at the Palo Alto VA, so I had to basically build a


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