Lia Ululani Young hasn’t yet won a tournament on the pro beach volleyball tour. But as she enters her fourth year, Young has one feat to her credit that is unlikely to be matched by her suntanned peers: taking apart an airplane carburetor on her parent’s living room floor and putting it back together.

Tanned, toned and with an athletic sex appeal tailor-made for her rather voyeuristic sport, Young seems the most unlikely of aviation mechanics. But she’s a certified “wrencher” and as comfortable with hydraulic tubing as she is with sand, ball and net.

But wait. There’s more on Young’s mixed plate. Besides spending her summers as a member of the small ohana of Hawaii-bred players on the pro tour, she’s also a licensed pilot, a professional model who has appeared in nationwide Nike ads and a businesswoman who runs the family aviation parts supply business Goldwings Supply Service. All by the age of 29.

“Life is short. You have to grasp opportunities when they come to you,” Young says. “But you also have to have the integrity to follow through.”

Young has had her share of opportunities, but it’s this down-to-earth Island girl’s ability to put on her game face and follow through that has made her what she is.

A perfect example is her introduction to competitive volleyball, which only came about after she bombed big time in cheerleader tryouts as a freshman at Mid-Pacific Institute.

“I got up to do my cheers and I just froze up. They just wouldn’t come out,” says Young.

“I wanted to wear a little skirt and do cartwheels and jump around. I was horrified.”

With her game days freed up, Young sought solace in volleyball, trying out for and making the varsity squad. She’d played a bit as a kid, mainly on the sidelines of her parent’s games. Her dad, Frank, had played for the Air Force and both he and Lia’s mother, Ululani, played in local leagues. But Lia was hardly an instant hit on the court.

“She was terrible at first,” says Darcy Iki, a friend and Mid-Pac teammate. “But she improved really fast.”

With Young coming on strong, Mid-Pac became a force and finished third in the state her senior year (1990). The University of Santa Clara then offered her a partial volleyball scholarship, but once they saw what she could do, it was upped to a full ride.

Not a bad move considering Young went on to become one of the greatest players in school history, setting single-game, season and career records for both digs and kills, and earning first-team all-West Coast Conference honors three years in a row.

More importantly, with Young as captain, the perennial also-ran Broncos went from being ranked 173 in the country to as high as 13th and made two NCAA tournament appearances.

After college, the marketing major came home to fulfill a childhood wish to obtain a pilot’s license and went to work accruing the requisite hours of flying time. Aware of the lingering sexism in the male-dominated aviation industry, Young sought to boost her credibility by concurrently pursuing certification as an aviation mechanic through Honolulu Community College’s department of aeronautics.

“The guys out here would always think I was a flight attendant because I had a ramp badge,” Young says, her ponytail cracking like a whip in the stiff breeze as she steers a golf cart through a tour of the flight businesses on the tarmac near Goldwings’ Lagoon Drive office. “I guess I didn’t fit the part.”

Aviation mechanics’ schooling is deliberately punishing to teach students to get it absolutely right due to the obvious consequences. Mistakes are not tolerated.

But it was familiar turf for Young. She’d spent her childhood hanging around the hangars and recalls counting aircraft parts on the living room rug with her parents and two sisters, breaking down bulk purchases into smaller units for Goldwings customers.

She focused intently on her training, once bringing home a plane carburetor and taking it apart on that same living room rug “to see how it worked.”

“Lia’s great strength is her ability to focus on whatever is in front of her,” says Frank. “Despite all the things she’s involved in, when something is in front of her, she’s 100 percent focused.”

All but a dozen of Lia’s 41 classmates succumbed to the pressure and dropped out. But Young stuck with it and obtained her certification in 1997:

“That was so gratifying, especially because only 8 percent of aviation mechanics are women.”

Her pilot’s license followed in 1999 and Young set her sights firmly on a career in aviation.

Meanwhile, Young, who had begun playing beach volleyball locally, was spotted by the then-commissioner of the Association of Volleyball Professionals, and he was sufficiently impressed to offer her a spot on the circuit without having to go through the normal qualifying routes.

This didn’t sit well with at least one fellow player, Marsha Miller, who complained about special treatment given to an unnamed player. “She made some comments to the press kind of suggesting I was wanted on the circuit just because I was a piece of eye candy,” says Young.

In typical fashion, Young worked hard and has earned the respect of her peers. She eventually patched up the spat with Miller and they paired up for a tournament which resulted in a fifth-place finish, a career best for both of them.

“She’s really getting a reputation as a fighter,” says former UH Wahine star Karrie Poppinga, who has paired with Young in the past. “Players know that when they face her, she’s going to push them.”

This competitive fire was on display during a recent practice match at the Outrigger Canoe Club, of which Young has been a member since childhood. Playing with a group of current and former pro players, Young’s girl-next-door smile morphs into a frosty glare as she focuses on the ball, digging out balls right and left, making pinpoint passes, seemingly reading her opponents’ minds and positioning herself accurately even before they hit the ball. She is clearly the best player out there but keeps slowing the action with repeated timeouts to verbally replay all the recent points, showing an impressive recall to make sure her opponents weren’t trying to steal a point or two.

“Aw come on. I can’t think that far back,” Janice Opalinski Harrer, one of the top players on the tour in her day, protests from the other side of the net.

In three summers on the tour, her best showings have been two fifth-place finishes, though she and former Punahou player Danalee Bragado took second at an international-level tournament in Bangkok last September.

Last year, ranked 17th and starting to hit her stride, Young was set to make a push into the top 10 when a knee injury stuffed those plans. Playing all of last year in pain, she fell to 25th.

But the knee is healing fast and Young says it should be ready for the season starting May 24 in Huntington Beach, Calif. She’ll pair with Gracie Santana, a member of last year’s U.S. national indoor squad. If they gel and the knee stays as healthy as her competitive drive, they could do some damage.

“I really think she’s a player on the rise,” says Poppinga, who notes that it takes a few years for many former indoor players to get their “sand legs” and that some don’t really hit their stride until well into their 30s.

It’s an open question as to whether Young will last that long on the tour, which requires her to move to, ugh, southern California from May to August.

But the serial opportunist is happy to milk what she can out of beach volleyball. That includes turning sexism to her advantage by trading on her local-style good looks, a puree of Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, American Indian and Dutch. Sublimely fit and with a smile so bright white it makes you want to reach for your shades, she’s landed Nike ads in Japan and the United States, as well as local TV spots for Jobs Hawaii, Hawaiian Miles and others.

She puts her marketing background to use drawing up self-marketing proposals for prospective corporate sponsors. Over the years, she’s wooed Hawaiian Wireless, Shiseido, Hobey eyewear and watchmaker Freestyle USA.

“In the aviation world, 99 percent of the people I deal with are male so you have to be prepared for a little sexism and learn to accept it. But in volleyball, let’s face it, it’s marketed partly for the sex appeal, and sex sells. So it’s not a bad thing if you can make it work for you and control what goes on.”

Despite her extracurricular activities, she remains firmly in control at Goldwings, which bills itself as the largest aviation parts supplier in the Pacific basin.

Her dad, Frank, a former Air Force and United Airlines mechanic, founded the business 25 years ago. But with a wife and three daughters, he realized long ago that he was outgunned in the gender wars and officially reduced his stake in the firm to 49 percent, leaving the rest for the Young women. “He always had to make sure the toilet seat in the office was down,” Lia says.

With her sisters having left Hawaii for lives on the Mainland, Lia has emerged as the sole candidate to take over the business. But with so many possible roads to travel, she’s keeping her options open, as usual.

“I set age 30 as my deadline to decide how long I want to continue with it. It’s been going well though so I might stick with it a bit longer. But when it ends, that’s OK, too. There’s more to my life than just that.”

There’s an understatement.