Unlikely Pair Makes Quite a Team on Beach

Take a mother of two and a lawyer and what do you have?

An Olympic beach volleyball team, of course.

Move over preconceptions, Linda Hanley and Barbra Fontana Harris have no room for you.

Hanley, who played at Laguna Beach High and UCLA, lives with her husband, John, and two young sons, Matthew and Turner, on a street in Pacific Palisades where policing Big Wheel races occupies much of her time.

Fontana Harris, who played at Manhattan Beach Mira Costa High and Stanford, lives in Laguna Beach with her husband, Charles, whom she met in 1991 when they were working together on a deposition.

Every Friday, Hanley, 36, kisses her children goodbye and Fontana Harris, 30, packs a copy of California Lawyer magazine in her bag and the pair hops a flight to a professional beach volleyball tournament.

Hanley and Fontana Harris have competed in 13 pro events together this year, and have won four championships, including the U.S. Open, June 16 at Ocean City, Md., and the U.S. Olympic beach volleyball trials, June 9 at Baltimore.

“Baltimore was the most stressful week of all our lives,” Hanley said. “You can tell yourself, ‘I’ve just got to play ball’ and ‘It’s just another tournament,’ but it’s not.”

Hanley and Fontana Harris are an unlikely pair of Olympians, but not because they are a mother and a lawyer. More relevantly, neither grew up with an Olympic dream--beach volleyball was added to the Olympics three years ago--and both spent years away from the sport before making a recent comeback.

Hanley was the No. 1 player on the Laguna Beach girls’ tennis team in 1974 and she shocked her tennis-loving family when she decided to hang up her racket for a volleyball. She led the Artists to their first girls’ volleyball title in 1976.

Nina Matthies, current Pepperdine women’s coach, was assisting UCLA Coach Andy Banachowski at the time and persuaded Banachowski to give Hanley, then Linda Robertson, a partial scholarship.

The decision to attend UCLA pricked a few nerves in Hanley’s family. Her father, Wilbur Robertson, played quarterback at USC in 1949. Three other members of her immediate family also attended USC.

By the end of her freshman season at UCLA in 1978, however, Hanley had earned a full scholarship and a starting spot.

“You would be amazed how fast your father can learn the [UCLA] eight-clap when you’re getting a scholarship,” she said.

Although Hanley was a three-time All-American before graduating in 1982, things weren’t all rosy at UCLA.

“I was somewhat of a coach’s nightmare,” she said. “The joke was that I was the one who gave [Banachowski] the gray hair.”

Banachowski would not confirm that allegation.

“Certainly not with the talent she has, although she tried,” he said. “We probably had a different opinion on how she should practice.”

What Hanley lacked in motivation at practice, she made up for with her competitiveness in games.

“She was a very natural, fluid athlete with good quickness and good reactions, plus she was left-handed and a lot of people couldn’t figure that out,” Banachowski said. “She was an excellent competitor, and she hated to lose and those things probably drove her to work harder than she may have realized she was working at the time.”

To break up the monotony of practicing year-round in the gym, Hanley teamed with Matthies for beach tournaments in the summer. The pair became so dominating that opponents often would crumble on the other side of the net. Hanley didn’t have to work very hard to win, which was fine with her.

“I’m not sure that she liked to play volleyball very much when she was younger. I’m not sure she knew why she was playing,” said Matthies.

When the WPVA formed in 1987, Hanley and Matthies made it to the finals of four events before Hanley began to devote more time to her job as a sales representative for a surf wear company. She played very little over the next two years before marrying John Hanley, who won 18 titles in his 12-year beach career and also was a member of the U.S. national team.

She quit again in 1991, when she was pregnant with her first son, Matthew, and stayed away from the courts through 1993, when she had Turner.

A few weeks after Turner was born, Hanley received a call from the AVP, which was starting a women’s tour.

“They said, ‘We need you in a bathing suit on TV in front of a bunch of people in April,’ ” Hanley said. “It was ballistic training.”

It was more than the threat of television cameras that pushed Hanley to work hard.

“I’m sure it was a little bit of ego. There was talk out there that if I did come back, there was no way I could win [because] it was a whole different ball game and I thought, ‘Now wait a minute.’ ”

The AVP’s eight women played in a rotation for several tournaments before declaring partners and Hanley ended up with Jackie Silva, the WPVA’s leading money-winner in 1989.

“My goal went from, ‘don’t embarrass yourself’ to ‘give them a good game’ to ‘try to make it to the show’ to ‘win a tournament,’ ” Hanley said.

She won two. And the next year, she won two more.

Hanley joined the WPVA last year after the AVP dropped the women’s tour and won two tournaments with Angela Rock. She ended up with Fontana Harris after last season’s annual postseason partner shuffle.

Hanley found a kindred spirit in Fontana Harris, who was making her way on the tour after taking four years off from volleyball for travel and law school at Santa Clara.

“The study of law is very intellectually stimulating. It’s a lot of problem solving, and, this sounds really corny, but I felt like I could do some good,” she said.

During her second year at law school in 1989, several Santa Clara undergraduate students approached her, volleyball in hand, and begged her to help with the program. Just down the road, Stanford Coach Don Shaw heard about her coaching and recruited her to assist him the next year.

In her last year of law school in 1990, a friend sent her information about the WPVA.

“I thought, “This would be a blast. Why don’t I go play a summer of volleyball before I become a lawyer?” she said.

She slapped a credit card on the counter for plane tickets and the next thing she knew she was faring well in tournaments in Texas and Florida. She called the San Francisco law firm that had offered her a job and was given the green light to start six months later than originally planned.

Playing with McPeak, the rookie pair finished the season as the sixth-ranked team on the tour in 1991 and Fontana Harris decided to take a job with a law firm in Los Angeles and continue playing volleyball.

Fontana Harris placed in the top four of three tournaments in 1992 and knew she had a difficult decision to make--she couldn’t continue both professions.

Volleyball won. In 1993, Fontana Harris became WPVA president, and in 1994 she married Charles, a member of the 1992 U.S. Olympic water polo team. Charles, a partner in the firm of Stevens, Kramer, Averbuck and Harris, encouraged Barbra’s volleyball career.

“My advice was pretty simple: You can always go be a lawyer, but your passion is athletics. You have to chase your dreams now because you can’t go back and do it in 10 years,” he said.

She keeps her law license current, however, and occasionally does freelance work.

“I never thought I would be a professional athlete. I never had the desire to be a professional athlete. To let go of the law was a huge decision for me. It was very difficult. I still have pangs. I still have times when I wish I were a lawyer. I talk to my friends and they are climbing the ladder in law firms and I have a jealousy for that,” she said. “My partner laughs at me. In the hotel room, she has Cosmo and People and I have California Lawyer and Smart Money. I have an Elle in there, too, but [the law and business magazines] are the kind of things I do to keep my mind going.”

And although they may not share magazines, they read each other well on the court.

“She can be very intense and I think I bring a little more levity, but I think it’s a good balance,” Hanley said. “She has been very instrumental in keeping me working as hard as I have ever worked in my life.”

Hanley puts down the phone for a moment and when she returns she reports that there are Legos all over the bathroom floor.

“It’s just now hitting me,” she says, “that I am going to be able to tell my children I was an Olympian.”