How Olivia Rattler is following in her big brother’s footsteps
How Olivia Rattler is following in her big brother’s footsteps
Olivia Rattler was forever being told to go outside because her parents didn’t want her practicing in the house. She wasn’t the only one.
Big brother, Spencer, was often right there with her, getting chased out of the family’s Phoenix home, too. They’d head to the backyard or maybe even a nearby park, him with a football, her with a volleyball.
“Spencer and I would trade off,” Olivia said. “I would catch the football with him, or he would try and pass with me.”
Even though their sports were different, their dreams were the same — play Division I.
This fall, they’ve achieved that goal. While everyone in the college football world has eyes on Spencer — the OU quarterback is an early favorite for the Heisman Trophy — there is equal excitement in the Rattler family for what Olivia is doing. She recently started her freshman year at Missouri State where she is a member of the beach volleyball team.
“She just got up to school the other day, and she’s just super excited,” Spencer said. “She just inspires me. She worked harder than me to get to where she’s at. She didn’t have all the top of
fers, top accolades, but she worked her butt off to get to where she wanted to be.
“Just seeing that as a big bro makes me so happy.”
Even though Spencer and Olivia, who are two years apart, have both reached this level, their journeys were not the same.
Spencer always seemed destined for it.
“I knew from a young age he was gonna go Division I,” Olivia said.
But her path didn’t seem as clear. Both of the Rattler kids played tons of different sports when they were little. Mike and Sue Rattler made sure of that, wanting to expose their children to a wide variety of options, hoping something might grab their attention. Olivia played soccer.
Hated it.
Tennis was an improvement. So were swimming, golf, softball, basketball, dance. Her dad actually put her on a basketball team with all boys at one point.
“She’s a good athlete,” Mike Rattler said. “I tell people all the time — she’s as good of an athlete as (Spencer) is. I tell people she is the female version of him.”
But while Spencer liked lots of sports and kept playing several all the way through high school, Olivia quickly focused her attention on volleyball. She started playing when she was only 6, but by the time she was 8, she was serving overhand.
“Right from there, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I want to be a Division-I volleyball player,’” she said.
She started playing club volleyball when she was 11, and a year later, she added beach volleyball.
Like many volleyball players, she started playing beach as a way to hone her indoor skills. She improved her movement, her quickness and her conditioning.
But after the indoor season her junior year of high school, with very little interest from major-college teams and no scholarship offers from Division-I pro
grams, she realized beach volleyball might be more than an offseason training ground.
Olivia is no slouch at 5-feet-11, but as an outside hitter, she was undersized for most Division-I volleyball programs. The top teams want outside hitters who are over 6-feet — sometimes way over it — and that seemed to be hurting her recruiting.
But in beach volleyball, her height wasn’t as much of an issue. With only two players per side, athleticism and versatility become paramount. Olivia had that in spades.
“The good thing about her is that she was able to have a skill set to where she could hit and she could block and she could dig and do everything,” Mike Rattler said, “and that’s kind of what you
had to have for beach. Her last year (of high school) she said, ‘You know, let me go ahead and switch. I’m probably going to have a better opportunity to play further.’”
Olivia trained and played with RPM Sand, a beach volleyball program based in Scottsdale which averages more than 10 college signees a year.
She went completely beach in early 2020, and later that summer, she had a breakthrough at a tournament called Beachfest.
The recruiters started calling, and the scholarship offers started coming.
Less than a week before Thanksgiving, she committed to play beach volleyball at Missouri State.
“So happy for you, Liv!” Spencer wrote on Twitter. “All the hard work is
paying off. Have seen you working your hardest since you were little to get to this point. Congrats!
“Love you!!”
Olivia was emotional, too.
“I broke down crying,” she said, “because all of these years, you work so hard for something and it finally pays off.”
Missouri State, by the way, plays at the Division-I level in every sport except football where it is part of the Football Championship Series, long known as Division I-AA.
Olivia gives a lot of credit to Spencer for helping her reach the major-college level.
“He is for sure the No. 1 person I’ve looked up to the majority of my life,” she said. “He’s always been there for me, in sports and in life. He’ll call me. We talk all the time, and he’ll call and check in and just all that stuff.”
Spencer says the admiration is mutual.
“I’m just super happy for her and knowing she looks up to me, that pushed me even harder,” he said. “We’re both going to be doing our thing at this level.”
As they do, they plan to continue supporting each other. She has plans to be at just about every OU game this fall — her schedule may conflict with a couple of them — and he may be able to see some of her Missouri State matches this spring.
Maybe when they’re together, they’ll go outside like old times and throw the football or hit the volleyball. Even though they always had fun doing that together as kids, their competitiveness was always an undercurrent.
Olivia still believes she is a better receiver than he is a hitter.
“I like to think so,” she said.
She smiled, then doubled down. “I tell him, ‘I could be a quarterback if they gave me the chance.’”
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at 405-475-4125 or jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.