BIG GIRL IN THE MIDDLE

The new superstars in sports are women, and pro beach volleyball player Gabrielle Reece is the hottest of them all. At six-foot-three, 170 pounds, Gabby Reece is at once beautiful and brutish, feminine and rowdy, accessible and intimidating--a woman who is exploding female stereotypes and redefining our image of the female athlete.

"A young girl doesn't get many chances to exercise the character muscle via sports, whereas for young boys, it's part of their everyday lives. For girls, it's especially good for them to be forced to work as a team with other girls, to work together under every possible condition--winning, losing, tired, grumpy, happy. 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, which ultimately gives them confidence in themselves."

"Everything a woman does has an emotional component. Paying attention to my emotional side without surrendering to it is one of the toughest parts of playing professional sports."

"I don't like this 'Fear of Being Big' thing because it feeds into the general female thing of wanting to be less--less powerful, less assertive, less demanding, less opinionated, less present, less big."

Karen Karbo is the author of two novels, Trespassers Welcome Here and The Diamond Lane. Her nonfiction essays have appeared in Esquire, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her story on America3, the all-women's America's Cup Team, originally published in Outside magazine, appeared in The Best American Sports Writing of 1996. She lives in Portland, Oregon