Natalie Martin has been serving up aces on the volleyball courts for most of her life for one simple reason.
“I got into it just because I was tall, and [volleyball] was the most popular sport for tall people,” Martin joked.
That’s why she was drawn to the sport, and height is one of the most common reasons players start the sport. But she stayed because she loved the game, and now she’s a grad student at UW working towards her master’s in law, otherwise known as a jurisprudence degree, while playing beach volleyball for the Huskies.
Martin dominated in the sport in high school, and then continued her success at Berkeley as she competed for a Bears squad that finished last year ranked No. 7 nationally and made the quarterfinals of the NCAA Championships as well. At UW, the law student has already made her presence felt as one of two pairs that represented the Beach Dawgs in the fall national championship this fall season.
Once her playing career is over, Martin intends to keep her competitive spirit alive by trading the tranquil sands of Alki Beach for heated negotiations in NFL conference rooms. She wants to be an NFL agent. To represent players, she needs a master’s degree, she said.
Martin is tailoring the courses to be more practical for her future career. That means taking a contract and I.P. law classes without getting overly bogged down with legal specifics, she said. She is even taking a negotiations class.
She grew up in Texas, where football is a way of life, sparking her love for the game and her likely future career. Martin spent her childhood attending Texas A&M football games with her two alum parents.
“The first game that I went to, I was not even a year old. I grew up going to those games every year, and… really fell in love with [football],” Martin said.
During the summer of her junior year at California Berkeley in 2022, she was the only football intern at the Creative Artists Agency in Nashville, which led to her working closely on the agency’s summer goodie bag project for clients.
In the sports agent business, giving football clients a goodie bag at the start of their training camp is common practice, which inevitably turns into a competition between the agencies. She was able to contribute by having some of her suggestions make it in the box such as AirPod Max headphones and Gucci slides.
Before college, the Texas native played indoor volleyball for her high school, Oak Ridge, and had a stellar career in which she posted…
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