4:30 a.m.: Wake up.

5:00 a.m.: Hit the gym.

6:15 a.m.: Get to the classroom.

Until the final bell rings, Katie Lindquist’s life is anything but a day at the beach.

Lindquist didn’t grow up in Fountain Valley, Calif., with plans to one day be a professional athlete. Instead, the self-proclaimed realist always knew she’d be a teacher. At 31 years old, she’s both.

It comes naturally—her father was a teacher and volleyball coach—but not easily.

“I’ve always loved kids,” the Huntington Beach resident says as her combination kindergarten/first grade class is out for P.E. “They’re so cute and fun to play with.”

Without early mornings and late nights, teaching might be the only love of her career.

“It takes a couple extra hours on both ends to get everything done,” she says. “You’re exhausted by the end of the day.”

There to keep her motivated is another teacher who plays on the AVP Tour—her younger sister Tracy.

“Tracy and I have a pretty good work ethic and we’re totally on the same page when it comes to our life,” Katie says. “We have to put work first and balance that with volleyball.”

Katie wasn’t convinced she would need to balance volleyball with anything, even after her three-time first-team All-West Coast Conference career at the University of San Diego.

“I still didn’t really believe it would happen,” she says, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Education to back it up. “It just naturally led to playing professionally.”

Her path took a significant turn in 2000, when Lindquist caught a big break. USA Volleyball had selected Tracy to compete in the Tel Aviv Open with current AVP athlete Chrissie Zartman, but when Zartman couldn’t go at the last minute Katie says she “got invited by default.”

Excited for her first international event, Katie quickly noticed she and Tracy stood in the shadows of fellow Americans Jen Kessy and Angie Kammer. “You’d see Tracy and me walking up looking like little shrimps, then the players walking up who look like they're professional,” Katie says.

Kessy and Kammer may have been perceived as the big stars, but the 5’6” Lindquist sisters rallied to win the tournament. A breakthrough moment? Not quite. Katie still considered the game more of a hobby than a career.

“Tracy and I would just play CBVA tournaments,” Katie says matter-of-factly, “and we ended up winning the tournaments we entered.”

Eventually, the sisters entered AVP qualifiers in Southern California and advanced to main draw play. Traveling wasn’t part of the plan until they got surprising news before a Tour stop in Michigan: They had accumulated enough points to get seeded directly into the main draw.

Unable to pass up the opportunity, Katie and Tracy gave it a shot. They don’t form the most intimidating tandem, but the sisters have a way of creating matchup nightmares.

“Tracy and I, more or less we’re the same player. We’re good all-around players, we’ve kind of mastered most of the skills,” Katie says, noting similarities that often leave opponents questioning whom to serve or how to handle their hit-happy offense. “We like to think we can still get up and hit. Most players are not used to running down shots for an entire match; nobody practices against it.”

Their unique style of play has Katie riding a streak of nine straight years as a top-30 AVP player. A recent spike has propelled Katie from No. 30 in 2007 to No. 19 in 2008 to a career-best No. 13 this past season, when she ranked third on the Tour with .85 aces per game. Another key: in 104 career events, Katie has partnered with somebody other than Tracy just seven times.

“We come into every season picking up where we left off last season,” Katie says. “Having a consistent partner has made a big difference.”

Having a consistent sport has also been a factor in Lindquist’s success. As a child, “every sport you can think of, I played it,” she says, rattling off soccer, t-ball, basketball, karate, and gymnastics. “All kinds of sports depending on the season.”

As for volleyball? Lindquist says it was always in the background. “It was just sort of around,” she says, even if it meant going to the beach and playing with her dad.

Now when she needs an extra body, Lindquist can go to the beach and play with her husband Bob, whom she married in July.

“My husband is so supportive. My parents always have been and always will be my hugest supporters, but Bob really believes in what we’re doing, both teaching and volleyball,” Lindquist says of the former UC Santa Cruz volleyball player, who helps hit and block balls during drills. “We’ll use him as a practice dummy when we need another body out there.”

A traveling enthusiast, Lindquist also has somebody to enjoy her trip to Kenya with next month during a break from school.

“I just like to go new places, I don’t like to go to the same place twice,” she says. Lindquist predicts she and Bob will be “kind of roughing it, we’re gonna be dirty and stinky and eating terrible food.” After pausing, she continues. “It’s gonna be the coolest trip ever.”

Lindquist also enjoys cooking and biking, but when she comes back she expects her passion for volleyball to pick up right where it left off. “If either of us didn’t have the desire to play volleyball so much, we couldn’t do it,” she says about playing with her sister. “We squeeze it in whenever we can.”

Even when it means waking up at 4:30 a.m., Lindquist has a track record of finding a way to squeeze it in—after school, of course.