Reid Priddy

Reid is a member of the USA Men's National Volleyball Team which recently qualified for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As is typical for professional indoor volleyball players, Reid has signed a one-season contract with a European Volleyball Club, Lokomotiv Novosibirsk located in Siberia, Russia. The season concludes at the end of April and Reid, along with the other members of the USA Men's Team, will return from Europe and begin preparing for the 2008 summer which will include 2 major competitions, the World League followed by the Olympics. Traveling with Reid around the globe is his loving wife, Lindsay. Lindsay is from San Diego, California. The two have quite a love story. They met nearly 12 years ago on the beach through mutual friends, dated three years later for about 15 months before splitting for 5 years without any communication. They reconnected in the Spring of 2006 and were married a year later on March 10th, 2007. She is an Interior Decorator and brought a small maltipoo named Fiona to the family. Together they make a great team and her love and support of Reid has enabled him to reach new heights in his career. They plan to settle down in Newport Beach, California once Reid retires from indoor.

In my own words...

One of the hardest questions I have to answer is, "Where are you from?" Let me explain. I was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1977. That is where both of my parents are from and where they live now. But there have been 3 cross-country moves from then to now. Our family moved to San Diego, California around 1985...I was entering the second grade. It was there in San Diego that I really fell in love with the beach. My parents got me a surf board pretty soon after we moved there and it didn't take long before I was hooked. I still remember my first wave. I really had no clue what I was doing, but I charged a 3 footer and stood up with both feet on the back of the board. The board, with me sort of on it, took a nose dive and the back of the board speared me in the groin. I couldn't walk for about two weeks. But I was a pretty fearless kid and that didn't stop me. In the latter years of elementary school, one of my buddies' dad was a surfer and would take us surfing before school started on Tuesday and Thursdays. When I wasn't able to go to the beach and had some free time, I would skateboard down to the local surf shop and just hang out and watch the surf videos on their T.V. for a few hours...dreaming one day I would be a pro too. I was also heavily involved in soccer and played for about 11 years competitively.

After my sixth grade year, my family moved again cross-country to Orlando, Florida. Orlando is not necessarily on the coast and being 13 years old, I was not able to drive myself. So my passion for surfing was stifled a little. I usually had to wait for weekend family trips to the beach. In the meantime, I played a lot of other sports, particularly soccer. It was in between my eighth and ninth grade year that I first played organized volleyball. I was in a P.E. class for summer school and the P.E. coach also happened to be the women's volleyball coach and she encouraged me to go out for the team. I tried out and made the Junior Varsity squad. I quickly fell in love with the sport. I was very small at the time and never got to play frontrow. I was a defensive specialist and would play back row for the bigger guys. We went undefeated that year in conference and I had a blast! But after that year we moved again...this time to Phoenix, Arizona and the jury was still out as to whether I would have the opportunity to play anymore.

However, as Divine providence would have it, 1993 happened to be the first year that boys volleyball was sanctioned as a varsity sport in Arizona! I was stoked and thankfully I moved to the school that had the best coach. It was in Phoenix that my passion for volleyball was really grew. We would play anywhere we could...on beach courts at parks or hotels, on carpet in Mormon sanctuary's, or at the various open gym's around the city. During the summer before my junior year there was a sand court built at our high school so we would wear boardshorts under our shorts and play at lunch time. There was no clear path to follow, though. No older generation or legacy to follow because it was the first years of organized volleyball in Arizona. We were pioneers in a sense and that really formed and characterized our crew. We saw ourselves as the "other" athletes. Not the "Friday night lights" crew but against the grain, sort of counter-culture in the athletics realm and greater social order at school. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that volleyball was so underdeveloped in the area. That sense of being counter-culture only fueled our crew to push the limits even further and we went out of our way to step outside the box. We would shop at Thift-stores before it was mainstream and even rocked three-piece suits bought for $3.00 to Homecoming. It also carried into exploring the boundaries of any extreme sport we would get a hold of. Not longer after graduation I had access to a wake-board boat and 15 passenger van, it was lights out! Phoenix doesn't have an ocean but it has lots of lakes...and due to their man-made nature, lots of cliffs too. So we would often try and find the hairiest cliff to jump off of. Phoenix also has a lot of retention fields that would gather shallow water during the rainy season. We would make skimboards and pull each other with a make-shift ski rope and anything else we could find, preferably motorized. Those were fun days.

It was around my junior year of high school that I began to think more seriously about volleyball. The desire to play beyond high-school began to come into focus and I started to make decisions to try and make that happen. One of those decisions was to stop playing soccer all together. That same year we ended up winning the State Championship. I don't regret how everything worked out but I do regret not sticking with more sports in high school. However, I had in my mind that if I wanted to play volleyball in college, I had to focus all of my attention on that. I also got my first real job that year to help pay for the Junior Olympics...at the famous eating establishment McDonalds! I opened the store in the mornings and had to get up at 4am to be at work at 4:30!!! Dedication right?! I had two pretty significant growth spurts in high school. A huge one between freshman and sophomore year and then a steady growth through my senior year into college. I was 5'5" freshman year of high-school and grew to 6'3" my senior year! I definitely felt it in my knees in those early years. I didn't reach 6'4" until college.

One thing many don't know about me as a player is that in high school I was predominately a setter and was part of a 6-2 offense. I would set through the back-row and spike on the right-side in the front-row. I was recruited by USC, UCSB, LMU and a host of other schools as a setter, not as an outside hitter. In fact, I had gone through all of the hoops and hurdles with USC and even had a home visit by them in Arizona. I was literally days away from signing at USC with a scholarship as a setter until we got a call from the head coach at the time, Jim McLaughlin, saying that another player recently came on the scene that they had interest in. He was a European guy whom had just taken the SATs and they were waiting for his scores...the Euros' name was Donald Suxho;) Funny how things turn out! So Donny passed the SATs and USC went with him. Maybe a day after all this went down, Rick McLaughlin (Head Coach of Loyola Marymount University and brother to Jim and who had accompanied Glen Sato from USC to Arizona on the early recruiting trip) called me and invited me to come check out the campus. So my dad and I went to check out the campus and I was immediately in. I remember telling my dad what I was looking for in a school...green (had my share of the desert), near the beach (been landlocked far too long), in Southern California and Division 1....SOLD!

Still to this day on the National Team the same conversation gets recycled at least once a year about who beat who in college...I can't contribute too much to that conversation though we did make a little bit of history at LMU in those four years. Nope,we didn't win a National Championship but I wouldn't trade my experience at LMU for a championship elsewhere for anything. I loved college! I loved LMU! I came in as an out-of-state, basically unknown and Rick had the foresight and wisdom to see my potential as an outside hitter and made that adjustment pretty much right away. I had never had to receive serve at a high level being a setter and opposite for the majority of my high school career so that is what held me back that first year. I played about 50% of the time and it was always my passing that kept me in limbo. After having one full college season under my belt I caught a better glimpse of the level of volleyball and skill required. So that summer I worked hard in the weight room with one of my best friends and teammate at the time Jason Lee, and added good strength. We worked hard as a team that year and made significant strides. After that year I was voted 2nd Team All-American and what I am most proud of, LMU Male Athlete of the Year. That year really catapulted my confidence.

We were reaching new heights as a program my senior year. We went 13 and 13 which was the best record up to date for our program, our team had a solid local/school following. We upset the #1 top ranked team in the nation, Long Beach State in the first round of playoffs! We finished that year 6th in the nation and was definitely on the up and up. Rick had done a great job building momentum for the program. That year, 2000, we were graduating 7 key players but the remaining 7 players were all underclassmen with lots of potential (who eventually ALL went on to contribute at other D1 schools). LMU was getting national attention and seemed to finally be in the position to take the next step in the volleyball world. The pump was primed for some solid years of recruiting. However, 2 weeks after we finished our last game, the program was cut. I cannot explain to you how that made us, the alumni that spanned decades, feel. We had fought together, over generations to try and get closer to establishing LMU as team to be reckoned with and yearly contender, to see it poof into thin air. It was done very discreetly also, so much so that the greater volleyball community couldn't or just didn't go to bat for LMU as they did for other programs in jeopardy. It was a sad loss for the all of us. That decision cannot be taken back and the momentum that was building can't be a spring-board anymore. However, I hope that LMU will field a team again someday. It was truly an awesome school to go to!

When I graduated college in May of 2000, I had no idea what I was going to do professionally. The moment had arrived when I was supposed to know what I "wanted to be when I grew up". But I needed more time. I had competed with the USA "B" team the previous summer in 1999 and heard rumors of professional volleyball overseas. However at the time I had no interest in going overseas to play mostly because I had no idea what that even meant. I had exposure to the National Team and the AVP but overseas was a big unknown and I was over it. I ended up doing both beach and indoor that year and it was really great to get a chance to see both sides of the coin early on. I still had hopes of trying to make the Sydney Indoor team so whenever the team was in the country, I would fly to Colorado Springs and train with the team. I knew that if I really wanted to make that team I would have had to red-shirt my senior year of college and train year-around. But there was too much to give up that year at school with friends, the team and a ministry that I was a part of. My experience was culminating at LMU and I couldn't leave it. So I hoped to play good enough that summer, after I graduated, to sneak onto the team in one of the last few spots for the 2000 Games. When the team would hit the road I would fly back to LA. I lived 3 houses from the sand in Hermosa Beach with my eventual Co-Best Men, Jason Lee and Jason Ring. We didn't have a lot of money and JRing ended up fronting the cash for the one-bedroom apartment that we called home. I slept on a futon in the dining room with an old stereo rack as a dresser. We were true beach bums. Our days would consist of playing Beach Volley, Surfing, crushing otter-pops, terry-chicken bowls, mini golf topped off with more time in the water! On the weekends we would travel and compete wherever the AVP tour was. I played through the qualifiers for the beginning of that season and finally broke into the main draw with Brandon Taliafero mid-summer. Besides Brandon, I also played with Matt Fuerbringer. The most memorable trip that year was Belmar, NJ. It was the first tournament Brandon and I were in the main draw so we were stoked. We were all tight on cash so six of us stayed in one hotel room. JLee and JRing were a team, Matt Fuerbringer and Casey Jennings were the other team, and Brandon and I...all in one hotel room! The drama was that J and J ended up losing to Matt and Casey to get into the tournament...it was also JRing's birthday which added insult to injury. But that kind of stuff happens all the time and its part of the trade. Another funny side-note is that my USA teammate Riley Salmon and his then partner knocked Brandon and I out of the tournament for a 13th....he likes to remind me and everybody else.

After Belmar was Virginia and that was the final road-trip of the summer for me on the AVP. The National Team returned from the World League Finals and I flew from Virginia to Colorado for one last shot at the 2000 Olympic team. I didn't make that team (I was an alternate) but I was on the bus heading to the Denver Airport with the team on the day of their departure. They were catching a plan for Sydney, Australia to represent our country and compete against the best in the World for the ultimate prize in our sport. I, on the other hand, was catching a plane for Los Angeles and it was on that day that I realized that four years of hard work were worth the payoff....competing in the Olympics. It was a defining moment for me. Not going on that trip helped motivate me to see past all the obstacles that lie ahead to get to that end.

Now, 8 years later, dozens of countries, hundreds of matches, thousands of hotels, hundreds of thousands of air-miles, over $1.5 million in earnings I write to you from a coffee shop in Siberia, Russia. The goal is to bring to center stage the world of International Volleyball and the distinct culture that is lived by me and many within volleyball. Though volleyball, namely men's seems to be a diminishing fringe sport in America, it remains one of the hottest tickets around the world. Stay tuned for more and join me in the "UNVEILING"!!