2000 Olympic gold medalist and three-time Olympian Kerri Pottharst has no shortage of compelling stories and lessons to share.

As a motivational speaker, Pottharst visits audience after audience in the Sydney, Australia area. The hometown hero frequently revisits her best and worst moments. Virtually all highs and lows in her career can be traced to one moment.

In 1992, Pottharst seemed to be at the top of her game. Australia’s best player and national team captain, she went up for a kill and landed awkwardly, completely destroying her right knee.

“That was the end of my indoor career,” Pottharst says of the injury that required three surgeries in three months, during which she doubted her chances of ever walking properly again. With “a ball of scar tissue the size of an eyeball” in her knee compounding the problem, she says, “I had no movement. I couldn’t bend or straighten my knee.”

Mentally, the injury took its toll as well. “My whole life at that point had been all about volleyball,” Pottharst says. “I didn’t know what to do.

“I basically could’ve sat there forever thinking, ‘That’s it, I’m done,’ and started off on a different career,” Pottharst says. But her boyfriend of the time had an idea.

He surprised her with a new white volleyball and asked her to do something the 27-year-old had never done before: write down a goal, on every panel of the ball.

Kerri Pottharst wrote goals on every panel of a volleyball after suffering a career-threatening injury in 1992.

“It gave me some direction and clarity over what I was going to do,” Pottharst says. When pain and tough times came, “it gave me a reason to keep going because I saw it every day.”

After a year of grinding to get back in the game, Pottharst returned to the gym. The hard surface proved too much. With the beach game as her only option, she found a way to succeed in the sand. Her athletic drive had been there all along.

Growing up, Pottharst played several Australian sports. She used her six-foot frame to excel in net ball (a derivative of basketball) and high jump and eventually started playing volleyball “by accident.” One night when her brother needed an extra player for a volleyball game, she accepted his spur-of-the-moment invitation to serve as “a filler for his team of five guys.”

Turns out, she could dig it. "Once I joined this sport where everyone was like, ‘You’re awesome, you’re big, you can play,’ I thought, ‘Wow. This is making me feel good. I’m gonna stay here.'”

Others’ support provided Pottharst a new source of comfort. “I was never an extremely confident young girl,” she says of growing up taller than many boys. “I was very sensitive, not full of confidence.”

Pottharst quickly grew confident enough to envision herself becoming Australia’s best player. A big part of doing it required a leap of faith.

When her boyfriend landed a teaching job in the UK, Pottharst quit a well-paying job as a sales executive for the Australian postal service. She pursued volleyball in Europe, where the level of play couldn’t be matched in Australia. Finding a team was no guarantee—even with 10 years of experience.

“It was a matter of asking around,” Pottharst says. “Once you put it out there and start telling people, opportunities come your way.”

An opportunity came just before the season from someone with contacts in Italy. Pottharst made the team and committed an hour each night to studying Italian. By midseason she spoke it at ease with her teammates, with whom she had started playing the best volleyball of her life. Her team didn’t win often, however, and the coach and captain were let go. When the team wanted a Brazilian star, Pottharst was shown the door as well.

Her contract guaranteed a full season’s worth of pay, but she opted to stay on and practice even when she couldn’t play in matches. Within a week of being dropped, she had worked hard enough to win back her spot.

“I learned a massive lesson about not giving up and giving your all until the last penny drops,” Pottharst says. “I was a big team player and never gave up.”

Pottharst returned to Australia as dominant as ever following her season in Italy. Then, the crippling knee injury almost forced her to give up.

Transitioning to the beach, however, gave Pottharst a playable surface and more control over her game.

“I actually loved the fact that now it was just me and one other person instead of me and five other people,” she says. “If you win a game you feel so much more responsible, as well as if you lose a game.”

Pottharst found beach volleyball more challenging than the indoor game because of more than the rigorous physical demands. “The hardest part is the mental part, to really perform when you’re out there in front of 10,000 people in a bikini…. The mental aspect of all that is huge.”

One of the biggest mental challenges Pottharst ever faced came after losing the semifinal match of the 1996 Olympics against a Brazilian team she and partner Natalie Cook had beaten before. Pottharst and Cook went into the match knowing a win guaranteed a medal, while a loss jeopardized their chances of reaching the podium.

“We were so focused on trying not to lose,” Pottharst says of her bronze medal performance in 1996. “You get what you focus on. The Brazilians crushed us because we were so afraid of losing.”

By the time she represented her home country in her hometown in 2000’s Olympic gold medal match, losing had no place in Pottharst’s mind. She and Cook trained leading up to the Sydney Games to believe in themselves specifically in the championship match, so on the day of they could focus strictly on playing their best, “which is exactly what happened.

“I don’t know when it hits you or if it’s ever hit me still,” Pottharst says of winning a gold medal in front of family and friends who had “driven from all over Australia to see it. I couldn’t believe everything we had done in the lead-up had worked and we had done it. It was our dream and it had come true.”

Pottharst’s shining moment came eight years after she almost lost her ability to walk properly. “What was the biggest disappointment in my life led to the biggest moment in my life,” she says. “So much success comes out of adversity.”

After retiring in 2002 at 37 years old, Pottharst again faced adversity when she made a comeback run at the 2004 Olympics with Summer Lochowicz. Following a last-place FIVB finish, Pottharst and Lochowicz needed to place in the top 13 in their last chance to qualify for the Olympics. They advanced to the semifinals to punch their ticket to Athens, where they placed ninth.

“I was upset knowing it was my last Olympics,” Pottharst says, “but later on I realized what I’d learned out of it and it was just another great journey.”

Even with her success on the world’s biggest stage, Pottharst won just three tournaments in 11 years on the FIVB Tour. She posted 55 other top-5 finishes in 92 events. As Pottharst puts it, “We had to peak at a certain moment. We couldn’t peak all year because we didn’t have the competition around us that the Americans and Brazilians did. We could only maintain that peak for a short period of time.”

Her explanation reflects her realistic optimism. “I’m very careful about the way I describe myself in any situation these days,” Pottharst says. “The more you tell people, not only will they believe you, you’ll believe it.

“Instead of saying, ‘I hit the ball as hard as anyone but I’m inaccurate,’ I say, ‘I hit the ball as hard as anyone in the world and every day I’m becoming more accurate.’”

Pottharst hit the ball well enough to get elected to the Volleyball Hall of Fame in 2007. The year after giving birth to her son Tyson, Pottharst left him for the first time to attend her ceremony in Holyoke, Mass.

“It’s always sad the first time you leave your baby at home, but there was no way I was going to miss it,” she says. “‘Beautiful’ is the best word to describe it. It made my life to be recognized.”

The FIVB also named Pottharst and Cook one of its two Teams of the Decade for 1990-2000. “Those two awards rate just as high as the Olympic medals,” Pottharst says.

Since retiring, Pottharst has coached AVP athletes Rachel Wacholder and Tyra Turner and Belgium’s top team. Now that she’s helping raise a family, she doesn’t plan to travel as often. “What I’d like to do is get teams to come down to Australia in the offseason and bombard them with everything I know,” Pottharst says.

When she’s not directly involved in the game, Pottharst devotes time to corporate team building and motivational speaking. During a typical engagement, Pottharst speaks to a group then takes them to the beach to apply lessons through volleyball—hence her company’s name, Beach2XL. (“I use the beach to excel in other areas of my life.”)

Pottharst is also working on a book covering everything she learned in 20 years as a professional athlete. It covers “everything you can possibly think of,” she says—traveling tips, nutrition, PR and more.

“I need to have a challenge, I need to have a goal, I need to have an aim,” Pottharst says. “Something that’s not easy, that pushes me out of my comfort zone.”

Writing a book and speaking to crowds while starting a family may not be comfortable. But Pottharst has pushed herself before, and the results speak for themselves.