Whitney Dosty has been a ballerina, a fashion model, a clothes designer and, now, at 33, a gold medalist in a sport she knew nothing about as recently as 2015.
After dislocating her ankle seven years ago while playing for Turkey in the European Pro Volleyball league, Dosty feared her accomplished volleyball career was over. Medical treatment and physical therapy were only temporary fixes.
“It got to the point where my ankle couldn’t take the pounding, jumping and running any more,’’ she says now. “I did everything possible — I didn’t want to give up — but two years passed and I still wasn’t able to play.’’
And then serendipity struck.
One day while rehabbing in Tucson, the former Salpointe Catholic High School and University of Arizona volleyball standout visited her mother, Tonii, who was watching the Invictus Games on TV.
“What sport is that?” Whitney asked?
“It’s sitting volleyball,” her mother said.
Whitney Dosty
The Invictus Games are a lead-up to the Paralympics, played by athletes who with everything from prosthetic arms and legs to physical deformities and severe injuries like the one Dosty suffered in Turkey.
“I googled everything I could find about sitting volleyball,” Dosty remembers. “After doing a ton of research, I reached out to the (United States Olympics and Paralympics Committee) and let them know I was a volleyball player prior to my injury. I wanted to know if I qualified to try out for the sitting volleyball team.”
She did.
In the summer of 2016, the Pima County Sports Hall of Famer flew to Edmond, Oklahoma, to Team USA’s training camp.
“It was a whole new discipline,” Dosty remembers. “I had to re-learn how to play volleyball while remaining in contact with the floor. The game is so much faster. It’s hard to put into words. It was an imposing challenge.”
She made the team.
On Sept. 5 in Tokyo, Dosty was part of an emotional 3-1 victory over China, long considered the world’s best women’s sitting volleyball program. Dosty stood with her teammates, most of them in tears, as a bouquet of flowers and a gold medal was presented to every American player.
“It’s hard to put into words,” she says now, having returned to Tucson before resuming training at Team USA headquarters in Oklahoma. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Very cool. Almost surreal.”
Whitney Dosty (center, back row) and her teammates celebrate winning goldin the sitting volleyball women's gold at the Paralympics.
Dosty’s journey to the gold medal stand in Tokyo included much more than learning how to play a new sport and improving her skills enough to make a veteran-loaded American team. In June, her father, Robbie Dosty, a UA basketball standout of the late 1970s, died of cancer in a Mesa hospice. He was only 62.
“I don’t have words for it,” she says. “I don’t know if you entirely process the passing of a parent. It has been very difficult but I know this is what my dad would have wanted for me. When it looked like my career might be over, he was proud of me sticking with something and seeing it through.
“He was with me every day in Tokyo.”
Tonii Dosty helped to endure her daughter’s anxieties for more than a year. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics were pushed back to 2021, and it took months before the International Olympic Committee spoke optimistically about staging the Tokyo Olympics at all. Team USA’s sitting volleyballteam was unable to schedule outside competition to prep for the Games.
Ultimately, the only stipulation was that fans would not be allowed to attend.
Whitney had been hopeful that her mother and her sister, Sybil Dosty, the Arizona Gatorade girls basketball player of the year in 2001 and a former standout at Arizona State, would be able to accompany her to Japan.
Whitney Dosty was a Salpointe Catholic and UA volleyball standout who was playing overseas when she suffered a serious ankle injury.
Fortunately, Toyota — which sponsored the Paralympics — paid for parents and families of the sitting volleyball team to fly to USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs and spend a week watching their daughters compete for a gold medal on television.
“I would get up at 3 in the morning to watch the team play because of the time difference to Japan,” Tonii Dosty says. “To see your daughter on this stage, it’s amazing. It’s hard to describe. I’m in awe of what Whitney has accomplished and the journey she has taken to get there. It was incredible.”
