Hall of Fame
From the 2016 Hall of Fame program:
Over a four-year period with the Pepperdine women’s volleyball team, Julie (Rubenstein) Bennett managed a hugely impressive streak, never missing a set and playing in all 423 of them. During that time she became not just one of the top players in the program’s history, but one of its finest student-athletes.
Rubenstein was a Volleyball Magazine Fab 50 selection coming out of nearby Oaks Christian High School. She arrived at Pepperdine in the fall of 2005 and had a brilliant four years.
She was named to the AVCA All-American third team as a senior and earned All-WCC honors in each of her four seasons, including the last three on the first team. She was also picked to the AVCA All-Pacific Region first team as a senior in 2008.
At the conclusion of her career, she ranked third all-time in kills at Pepperdine with 1,743, and was also third in points (2,064), fifth in kills per set (4.12) and fifth in service aces (116). She led the Waves in kills all four seasons.
Her senior year included a spot on Collegiate Volleyball Update’s “Stellar Spikers” first team, a list of the nation’s top 14 players. She led the WCC in both kills (4.42) and points (5.14). She earned tournament MVP honors at all four non-conference events, was WCC Player of the Week twice, WCC Player of the Month once and a CVU.com National Player of the Week. She recorded double-figure kills in 26 of 28 matches, including a career-high 31 at Oregon State.
Rubenstein helped lead the Waves to the NCAA Tournament all four seasons (including reaching the Sweet 16 in 2005) and to a 73-43 overall record (.629).
Rubenstein’s off-the-court accolades were also plentiful. She won the West Coast Conference’s Michael Gilleran Award as the league’s top female student-athlete in 2008-09. She was one of 10 Division I finalists for the 2009 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.
She was a three-time WCC All-Academic selection and was twice a CoSIDA Academic All-District honoree before graduating with a degree in liberal arts in 2009. She received Pepperdine’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year award for 2007-08.
Rubenstein became the first person from Pepperdine to earn a spot on the NCAA’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, and she served as the WCC’s SAAC chairperson and as a co-chair for Pepperdine’s SAAC.
Her volleyball career included time at various levels in the U.S. National Team system, including the A2 team in 2007, a USA Select team in 2008 and a senior-level national team in 2009. She played professionally in Azerbaijan and Puerto Rico between 2010 and 2013.
She’s not the first member of her family to be inducted into the Pepperdine Athletics Hall of Fame. Her grandfather, Gary Colson, was the Waves’ basketball coach from 1968-79 and he was inducted in 1996. Both her parents, Jay and Anne, and her sister Rachel also graduated from Pepperdine.
She coached at Oaks Christian High School in 2015 and was previously the head coach at Pacifica Christian High School, which she led to the CIF Southern Section Division 4AA title in 2013. She was named the CIF Division 4AA Coach of the Year.
She married Nate Bennett (who was a water polo standout at California) in 2005. She now works as the director of volleyball at Sports Academy in Newbury Park, California.
