Flo Hyman
| Flo Hyman | |||||||||||||
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| Full name | Flora Jean Hyman | ||||||||||||
| Born |
July 31, 1954 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
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| Died | January 24, 1986 (aged 31) Matsue City, Japan |
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| Height | 6 ft 5 in (196 cm) | ||||||||||||
| National team | |||||||||||||
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Medal record
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Flora Jean "Flo" Hyman (July 31, 1954 – January 24, 1986) was an American athlete who played volleyball. She was an Olympic silver medalist and played professional volleyball in Japan.
Hyman was the second of eight children. As a child, Hyman was self-conscious about her rapid growth and the fact that she towered over most of her peers, but her family and friends persuaded her to be proud of it and to use it to her advantage. Hyman's parents were tall. Her father was 6'1" (1.85 m) tall and her mother 5'11" (1.80 m), but Flo outgrew both of them. She stood six feet tall (1.83m) on her 12th birthday and her final adult height, which she reached by her 17th birthday, was just over 6' 5" (1.96 m).
When she was 12, she began playing two-on-two tournaments on the beach, usually with her sister Suzanne as partner. By the time Flo was a senior in high school, she had developed a lethal spike.
Hyman graduated from Morningside High School in Inglewood, California and then attended El Camino College for one year before transferring to the University of Houston as that school's first female scholarship athlete. She spent three years there and led the Houston Cougars to two top-five national finishes, but did not complete her final year, instead focusing her attention on her volleyball career. Hyman said she would graduate once her volleyball career was over and that "You can go to school when you're 60. You're only young once, and you can only do this once".
"I had to learn to be honest with myself. I had to recognize my pain threshold. When I hit the floor, I have to realize it's not as if I broke a bone. Pushing yourself over the barrier is a habit. I know I can do it and try something else crazy. If you want to win the war, you've got to pay the price."
Hyman left Houston to play for the national team, based in Colorado. When Hyman joined, the squad was sorely in need of leadership. Operating without a coach, it had a host of talented players with no one at the helm to guide them.
In 1975 the U.S. team floundered through qualifying rounds for the 1976 Olympic games and failed to make it. In 1977 the team finished fifth at the World Championships. Hyman and her teammates looked forward to qualifying for and playing in the 1980 Olympics, but their dreams were curtailed when the United States boycotted the Moscow games.
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Wikipedia