Beach volleyball pro Alex Ukkelberg comes out: 'Thankful that I'm gay'

This story originally appeared on Out.Alex Ukkelberg said he has been living his best life as an out gay man in Los Angeles for years, having come out to family, friends and in the pro beach volleyball community. But beyond that, it wasn’t until Wednesday that he said anything about it publicly."There's no way I could be gay," the 32-year-old from tiny Battle Lake, Minnesota said in his coming out video. "Is there?" "When you grow up in a town of less than 800 people, being different is almost always a bad thing — and it’s definitely something you want to hide," Ukkelberg wrote in the caption. "I knew I was different from a young age.. but I didn’t know what that meant."“I’ve been out for a long time to family and friends and as I shared more on social media it just felt like a good thing to say. Visibility matters,” Ukkelberg told the LGBTQ+ sports site Outsports in an interview following his social media post. See on Instagram In his video, the former women's volleyball coach for the St. Cloud State Huskies talked about the various sports he played growing up: He ran track and competed in basketball, baseball, and football. Ukkelberg said while he knew he wanted to be an athlete, he said he thought that meant "there's no way I could be gay."That's the message he said the world reinforced, as he showed a flurry of images of him as both a student-athlete and as a guy dating women. Ukkelberg confessed that he actually didn't even think of himself as gay for many years. "Up until my sophomore year of college, I genuinely thought I was straight," he said, adding that he intensely felt the weight of finally admitting his identity for the first time. “Saying the words ‘I’m gay’ out loud for the first time was really hard for me,” said Ukkelberg.He added that he struggled with his sexuality so much that for a long time, he contemplated staying in the closet. But the toll of hiding who he was while pursuing sports was too much, he said. “After qui