Her name is Gabrielle, but mostly she is called Gabby or Gab. She is 6-foot-3 and possesses a look that conveys both athleticism and feminine beauty. A new spokesperson and expert for Yahoo! Health, as well as on her own site: www.gotogabby.com, Gabby is also a producer of a health and fitness products; "The Primal System" with fitness expert Paul Chek and can be seen hosting a show for Fit Tv/Discovery, 'Insider Training,' where she profiles professional athletes about their training and conditioning regimes. Gabby, formerly a pro beach volleyball player, her face also can be seen on the cover of magazines such as Sports Illustrated for Women, Travel & Leisure Golf, Women's Sports & Fitness, Outside, Elle, Shape, Self, Harpers' Bazaar, Volleyball, Fitness, and in Life, Vogue, People and other magazines. Gabby co-wrote a book with Karen Karbo about her life as a pro athlete entitled "Big Girl in the Middle," published by Crown (1997). She also wrote a column for Conde Nast's magazine Women's Sports & Fitness, and before that she was a contributing editor at Elle magazine. Gabby can be seen featured on TV every year as a host on ESPN and NBC's "Gravity Games," and she won a huge number of fans by taking risks while road-luging, white water kayaking, drag racing, surfing, sky diving, and more on "MTV Sports" (1993-95) and "The Extremists with Gabrielle Reece" (1995-96). She was also a commentator at the 1998 Goodwill Games. In Gabby's theatrical work, she played the supporting role of a physical trainer in the film "Gattaca" (1997), a pro beach volleyball player in soon to be released "Cloud Nine" with Bert Reynolds (2004); as well as guest starred in "North Shore" (2004) and "8 Simple Rules" on ABC (2005).
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 staged at the UCLA Tennis Center. A Florida State star turned pro, 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. She was only a sophomore at Florida State University when Elle named her "one of the five most beautiful women in the world" in 1989, the same year her coach said, "She likes to hit the ball hard and put it back in somebody's face." The lure of the smash is still with her: For four consecutive years, she was the WBVL kills leader in 1993-1996, she was named the Offensive Player of the Year in 1994-95, and in 1993 the League blocks leader. "I enjoy getting the ball to go exactly where I want it, at the speed I want it to go," says Gabby. She was training hard to hone her skills in 2-person beach volleyball, and was competing domestically in the 1999-2000 Olympic Challenge Series, the 1999-2000 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour, and other competition, when she was approached with an opportunity to play golf.
California born, she is a mix of a mother from Long Island (her height comes from mom), and a 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 he wore. Raised on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, Gabby didn't take up volleyball until she was in the 11th grade when she and her mother moved to St. Petersburg, Florida. She won an athletic scholarship to Florida State University where she majored in Communications, and played two seasons of volleyball before accepting any offers from the modeling world. In 1989, she took off to model in New York. She returned for six weeks that summer to take classes, then flew to New York for more modeling. In August, she was back on campus for the season. It meant turning down five-figure jobs to earn All-Tournament honors several times in her collegiate career. In 1997, she was selected for induction into the Florida State University Athletic Hall of Fame. Gabby set two school volleyball records in solo blocks (240) and total blocks (747). Both records still stand.
Gabby is one of three athletes named in Women's Sport & Fitness' 20 Most Influential Women in Sports list (Aug/1997). Regarding their choice of Gabby for that 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." In its first television spot with Gabby in 1993, Nike introduced her as its female Bo Jackson in a tongue-in-cheek commercial that pokes fun at the differences between being an athlete and a model. The girl in the commercial "is me, just a bit extreme," says Gabby who strongly believes being athletic is not unfeminine. She was Nike's first-ever female cross-training spokesperson (1993-99), and its first-ever female athlete to help design a shoe. Working with Tinker Hatfield, designer of the Air Jordan, her shoe the Air Trainer Set was launched in 1994; the Air Patrol in 1995 (first-ever women's shoe that ever outsold men's and outsold Air Jordan in a certain Q.); the Air GR in 1997, and the Air GR II in 1998.
