Holyn Handley BS’17 was an academic and sports standout at UT Dallas. Now, Handley has put her engineering career on hold and her aspirations on a new course as a pro disc golf player.

Sitting in a hotel room in Emporia, Kansas, Holyn Handley BS’17 found herself in the unfamiliar position of preparing for a news conference. The gathering, featuring select competitors on the Disc Golf Pro Tour in town for a tournament, was a first for the rising star.

“It’s the first time they invited me, and they usually only invite a handful of players,” said Handley, who lives in Austin, Texas.

She traveled in April to compete in the Dynamic Discs Open, a Professional Disc Golf Association event, which attracted 166 players from around the world. The tournament sponsor was a disc manufacturer whose professional traveling team Handley joined in her second year as a pro.

With a contract in hand, Handley put her engineering career on hold to pursue a rare chance to compete as a professional athlete.

“If I hate it, I’ll go back and find an engineering job,” she said. “But I just couldn’t pass it up.”

Handley is accustomed to the athletics spotlight. A standout volleyball player from Grapevine, Texas, she played for The University of Texas at Dallas for four years. Her team won back-to-back American Southwest Conference championships in 2015 and 2016, setting a school record for wins during the latter season. Along the way, Handley was recognized individually with several conference honors.

Handley was also a standout engineering student in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. She balanced the demands of volleyball with challenging classes, working as an undergraduate research assistant and joining a student team competing to design a sensory rehabilitation device for the University’s Texas Biomedical Device Center.

“I was waking up really early for hard practices, balancing that with school and figuring out how to work hard and work efficiently,” Handley said. “And you still had to get enough sleep.”

After graduating with a biomedical engineering degree, Handley — along with her boyfriend, Tyler Morgan BA’16 — moved to California for an engineering internship followed by a job offer as a process engineer for medical device company Applied Medical.

Handley…