In her 13th season playing full time on the pro tour, McPeak is still sprinting on the beach. Following the AVP event in San Diego, her career victory total stands at 66, one shy of the all-time mark of 67 set by Karolyn Kirby, who retired in 2000. With help from her athletically-gifted partner, Elaine Youngs, she has her sights set on passing Kirby, an accomplishment she never would have dreamed of when she first competed in a pro event in 1987.

“I thought I could have a good career,” she says. “But to have this type of career? No. I can’t believe I’ve won 65 times.”

Over the years, McPeak has disproved a lot of people who didn’t think that talent, skill and determination could overshadow the limitations of topping the height chart at 5-6 3/4. That was true even in high school, when she heard you had to be at least 5-8 to set on a Division I team. It unnerved her. Not because she thought she couldn’t set at that level but because she worried she wouldn’t get a shot. To be safe, she told everybody she was 5-8, and she ended up getting all the offers she wanted. But the week she planned to commit to UCLA, the coach, Andy Banachowski, signed a 6-foot setter from Chicago, and despite Banachowski’s assurances to her that she was still his top choice, she changed her mind and accepted an offer to play at Cal Berkeley.

If there is a recurring theme in McPeak’s career, it’s this: she takes action when knocked backward and usually turns it to her advantage. At Cal, she was one of several players – another was Lisa Arce, her friend and fellow AVP player – who had major differences with the coach, Dave DeGroot. After her junior year, DeGroot told her he didn’t want her to return for her senior season, so she transferred to UCLA, beat out a taller setter – Jennifer Gratteau – and led the Bruins to an NCAA title, their first in six years.

On the beach, she was dropped three times by her former partner, Nancy Reno, who was at her side for a fifth-place finish at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and 20 tournament victories. In 2000, after the third dumping from Reno, she moved on to Misty May, who was a rookie and had no FIVB qualifying points. Given the late start – and given May’s inexperience – a lot of people doubted they could make it to Sydney, but it wasn’t long before they were beating higher ranked opponents, including the dominant Brazilians. Much to everybody’s surprise except their own, they did qualify, and many who were in Sydney say they would have won a medal if May hadn’t suffered a severe abdominal injury two months before the Olympics.

“Misty’s injury slowed them down,” says Sinjin Smith, who represented the U.S. at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and has 139 career beach victories. “I’m convinced that if Misty was at full speed, they would have won the gold.”

You can be sure that even with Misty’s injury, McPeak wasn’t aiming for anything less than gold. It’s safe to say that she’s not a believer in moral victories, even if all indications

are that a true victory is improbable. In 1995, after she was cut loose by Reno the first time, she turned to Arce, who she’d known from the time they were teammates at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, California. Arce was new to the pro tour, but when she and McPeak talked about signing up together for an FIVB tournament in Puerto Rico, McPeak made it clear she wasn’t viewing it as a warm up.

“Holly was like, ‘We’re playing in Puerto Rico and we’re winning,’” Arce says. “And I was like, ‘Well, this is my first time playing with you, and I’ve never won a tournament,’ and she said: ‘We’re winning.’ And we did win.”

Winning – or the pursuit of a win – was a big part of McPeak’s childhood. She has a twin brother, Gary, and a younger sister, Katie, and the three of them would always be doing things like sprinting out of the grocery store to the car to see who could get there first. When Holly talks about it now, she doesn’t mention anything about it being fun. She says: “It was good for me.”

Her mom, Susan O’Connor, is competitive, too. A couple of years ago, she and Holly were in a ping pong tournament. They ended up playing each other. When the ball started flying back and forth over the net, the two of them were going at it so hard that everyone stopped to watch. Holly won one game, Susan another. It went to a tiebreaker – yes, Holly eventually pulled it out – and at one point, when they switched sides, Susan held up her hand for a high five, and Holly left her hanging.

“I was like, ‘You’re my opponent, I’m not giving you five,” Holly says. “She said: ‘Yeah, but I’m your mom.’ I said: ‘I don’t care.’”

And yes, she was serious.

“Yeah, I was serious,” she says. “I’ll give her five at the end of the game. I was pissed that the game was that close.”

Mixed into her ultra competitive childhood environment was another element that has surely contributed to her athletic triumphs: discipline. McPeak says her father, Chuck McPeak, is “one of the most disciplined people I know. Too extreme, as far as I’m concerned.” But certain things were expected, she says. You went to school every day no matter what. You weren’t late. If you were on a soccer team, you went to practice. Every practice. You didn’t miss a game for a birthday party.

“That’s how I was brought up,” she says. “To me, that’s normal. But it’s not normal for everybody.”

It’s an attitude she has carried into adulthood. Her workouts have been known to be so long and rigorous that she has given up doing them with her partners and now trains on her own. Recently, she was asked if she ever has a day where she wakes up and doesn’t want to practice, and she responded: “No. I don’t. Because I still have things I want to achieve in my career.”

Off the court, she is equally diligent. When Misty was her partner, Misty’s dad, Butch May, said one of the great things about playing with Holly was knowing that she would take care of every little detail. If a form is due on a certain date, he noted, Holly “has it in five days ahead of time.”

When you e-mail her, you always get an e-mail back, usually the same day, often within hours, always succinct and to the point, covering just what you need and no more. Ask her to get something for a charity function, she does it. A while back, she was contacted about tracking down a Shaquille O’Neal signed basketball for a young boy – a Lakers fan - who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Inside of two weeks, the ball was in the boy’s hands, signed by Shaq. Ask her for an interview, she’ll do it. Unless she has a conflict. And if she has a conflict, she’ll tell you she has a conflict. Never, ever, does she say she’ll do something and then forget about it or show up late or call you at the last minute to cancel. This is just the way she thinks things should be done, the code she has always lived by.

“I can’t stand flakes,” she says. “That’s my pet peeve. I cut them out of my life for the most part. Because I don’t need it. Who needs people who are going to show up an hour late, who are irresponsible and who don’t do the things that they’re supposed to do? I’m really not tolerant when it comes to that kind of stuff.
“I mean, we play beach volleyball for a living. How lucky are we? We need to do everything we can to set a good example.”

Sitting in the shade of the players’ tent at the AVP tournament in Tempe, Arizona in late April, McPeak, who would turn 34 in a few weeks, was asked about her pursuit of Kirby’s record. Like most players chasing a milestone, she has often downplayed it, explaining that focusing on a record can detract from your attention to what’s most important: the point you are playing at that moment.

She began telling the story of her first pro tournament. It was in Austin, Texas, in 1990, and she had no money in the bank. She charged the trip on her credit card.

“All I could think about was the money,” she said. “And I sucked. I couldn’t play the game. It was the difference between 900 and 500 bucks, and when you have nothing, that’s huge. But that was a lesson I learned. If you focus on something other than the next sideout and being aggressive, it doesn’t work.”

Still, she said the record is in the back of her mind. More than anything, it’s a testament to her proudest accomplishment: winning consistently over a long, long time, and doing it with different partners.

It isn’t going to be easy. It isn’t as if she’ll be able to walk to 67 victories from where she is now. Winning on this season’s tour is arguably as difficult as it’s ever been, a grind through the early rounds, then a battle in the later rounds with two world class teams: Kerri Walsh-Misty May and Jenny Johnson Jordan-Annett Davis. Against both, McPeak has to put the ball away against a towering block.

Her confidence remains, though. As always, she believes.

“I know from past experience that I can win in tough conditions,” she said. “And people might say: ‘But now she has to worry about Kerri and Misty and Jenny and Annett.’ Maybe that’s true. But you know what? They have to worry about us, too.”