NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Anders Nelson knew things weren’t going well. To be sure, this didn’t set Vanderbilt apart from most college volleyball teams that visit Texas. Perennial Final Four contenders backed by loud and large crowds, the Longhorns are rarely hospitable hosts on the court. But looking around at his many freshmen during Vanderbilt’s first SEC match in 45 years, Nelson could read their minds as clearly as if he saw the thought bubbles.
They didn’t see it coming.
They couldn’t have. For a first-time skydiver, no amount of preparation makes those first weightless seconds any less overwhelming. For the first SEC road trip of your life, even after more than a year of practice, well, you just hope your parachute opens.
“That match was definitely a welcome-to-college experience for a lot of our team,” senior Elli Kinney said of the defeat. “Starting conference in one of the most competitive and loudest places to play volleyball, there was definitely a sense of ‘Wow, this is what we’re going to do every weekend?’”
It is the essence of the college experience that surroundings stay the same as people change. The same buildings, streets and neighborhoods that once formed a maze grow familiar. If you’re Kinney, beginning your third year on campus, you can put on a blindfold and still find the coffeeshop on Broadway where she swears you’ll find at least one member of the team at any hour. If you’re Maya Witherspoon, starting your fourth semester, you know how to manage your time when practice, papers and exams collide—and which restaurants in 12 South to visit when your parents are in town to pick up the check.
And if you’re a team beginning the second season of this new era, you know what’s coming. Every weekend. And what you’re going to do about it—what you began in earnest during last November’s memorable SEC Tournament wins and continued through spring practices and exhibitions, offseason workouts, open gyms and even summer internships.
A year ago, a team with abundant hope and scant experience brought volleyball back to Vanderbilt. With no example to follow, at least in their lifetimes, they could only measure themselves against their own hopes. Now, a new season begins with a mindset shaped by their experiences: Be the team that those who follow measure themselves against. Set the standard.
“We have to go earn what we want,” Nelson said. “We have to earn what we consider success.”
Senior Elli Kinney (No. 8) during Vanderbilt's spring season.
Refocusing on the Process
The loss at Texas and another a few days later at Texas A&M made for one of the season’s less enjoyable weeks, but there were plenty of inspiring days, too. From taking a ranked Kansas team to five sets in the restored program’s inaugural match to the first victory in an unforgettable home opener in front of a raucous student section on Wyatt Lawn, the first-year program showed the college volleyball world and itself that the Dores belonged.
The good, the bad and everything in between set the stage for the second season.
“They understand what it takes a lot more today than they did 365 days ago,” Nelson said, “Which is a comforting feeling as a coach.”
The coach understands a lot more, too. Part of a national championship staff at Kentucky, he knew what excellence looked like—not just the vibes but the tangible efficiency in things like blocking, passing and serving that separates wins from losses. He knew where the team needed to go. What was harder to discern, with only a handful of people who had ever played a college game on the roster, was how quickly they could cover that ground.
“I didn’t handle unexpected failure, as dramatic as that phrase sounds, as well as I would have liked,” Nelson said. “What I mean by that is losses that I anticipated would be wins, players not performing at the expected level—and me performing to the expectations that I have for myself.”
As the team searched for a foothold during the rugged SEC season, rather than entrench, he adapted. Same values, different communication.
As one small example, early in the season, he regularly showed the team data on their individual and collective performance relative to numerous statistical benchmarks. But as Witherspoon put it, knowing you had the best hitting numbers but also the worst passing numbers among outsides at a given moment only added to the pressure on confidence already being tested. All the more for the sort of perfectionism-inclined students attracted to a school like Vanderbilt. So, Nelson stopped showing them the statistics all the time.
Similarly, a beloved figure in the sport precisely because he lacks artifice, and what you see is what you get, he nonetheless also tried to govern the emotion in his postgame messages, win or lose.
“One of the biggest things that he communicated with us was being more process driven rather than outcome driven,” Kinney said “That was huge, and I think it created a turning point in our season, just trying to do things the right way and not worrying so much about the outcome. Obviously, we want to win and that’s super important at this level, but I think just shifting the perspective to emphasize doing things the right way was really beneficial.”
Head coach Anders Nelson addresses the team this spring.
Setting the Stage for More
Sure enough, as the group defined itself less by outcomes, outcomes improved. The Dores closed the final regular-season stretch with wins against a Missouri team receiving votes in the polls and on the road at Mississippi State—their first SEC road win.
Back-to-back wins in the SEC Tournament in Savannah, Georgia, followed. For Kinney, one of the season’s defining memories is jogging back to the locker room after the second-round win against Georgia. Surrounded by teammates and enveloped in the mirth and swagger of success, she readily recalls the noise crescendoing as senior Jackie Moore advanced Vanderbilt’s sticker to the next line of the posterboard bracket.
It was a far cry from the silence after matches like the one at Texas months earlier. At the end of a long and often challenging season, the conference tournament could have been one more item to check off the list before a chance to rest. Instead, Witherspoon and Kinney described a team that looked within and found a second wind for the closing kick.
“That was definitely our building block,” Witherspoon said. “We’ve talked a lot about that. Yes, we didn’t have the greatest season on paper. But that was the start of our new chapter. And obviously, now we have new players and some new staff, so it’s how can we bring that mentality from the tournament into Team 2?”
The Commodores celebrate during the 2025 SEC Tournament.
Team 2’s Mission
Physical reinforcements were always part of the plan, all the more after losing someone like Moore, who completed her eligibility as the first Dore to earn All-America honors. In addition to another talented freshman class, the Commodores have added four transfers, all of whom fill specific needs and will likely play significant roles: Carly Hendrickson, MK Patten, Avery Scoggins and Samantha Wunsch.
But a year after taking the court without anyone who had played a match for Vanderbilt, this year’s roster includes 11 returning student-athletes and an almost 100 percent retention rate. In this day and age of student-athlete movement, such continuity is reason enough for optimism—proof of the belief carried over from last season. They have experience. Now, it’s up to them to use it. It’s the message Hendrickson, a graduate transfer from national power UCLA, tried to stress as she settled in during the spring.
“I’m learning what this team is used to and how they communicated and interacted with each other in the past,” Hendrickson said in March, “But I’m also kind of bringing the reality check that it takes a lot more than where they’re at, and it’s easier said than done.”
Choosing their own captains was a start. A year ago, it made sense for Nelson to name the few upperclassmen as captains. As those leaders exhausted their eligibility and claimed their degrees, he turned over that responsibility to the team. They picked two experienced transfers, Wunsch and Scoggins, and two players who have been part of the Vanderbilt project essentially from the start, junior Reese Animashaun and Kinney.
“Voting for the people who we think best represent what being a captain means—and what setting the standard means—on and off the court was super important to all of us,” Witherspoon said. “Everyone on the team is great academically, and we’ve all been bought in all summer. But I think knowing that we agreed that these four people really represent the program and who we want to be on and off the court was really good for us.”
And it goes beyond top-down leadership. In May, as school year ended and teammates scattered to the four corners of the map, they formed smaller accountability groups to keep each other honest and motivated with offseason workout plans. It was probably for the best, Witherspoon joked, that everyone got their work in because they never did get around to figuring out how to enforce consequences for slacking. But even something as simple as logging activities and offering encouragement in the mini-group chats served a purpose.
Kinney and Witherspoon (No. 11) sign autographs last season.
Or take the team’s summer efforts. There are the familiar volleyball routines of early-morning lifts and evening open gyms, those competitive cauldrons where, mostly, good-natured trash talk reigns and the regular practice honor system on touches gives way to the dark arts. But there’s also good reason Wunsch suggested earlier this summer that Team 2 was already setting an almost-impossible bar for future teams in the quantity and quality of internship student-athletes accumulated. Making good use of the program run by the Ingram Center for Student-Athlete Success, Dores have ventured into fields far and wide. After previously interning with the Tennessee Titans, for instance, Kinney spent the summer working for the Nashville Sports Council. Witherspoon spent her internship in the athletic department’s business office, learning about things like revenue generation and gaining a deeper knowledge of the rapidly evolving college sports landscape that includes her.
“I think a lot of times your mind goes directly to when we’re playing in games and everything is competitive and all the lights are on,” Kinney said. “But, to me, setting the standard means the work we put in behind the scenes—the early-morning lifts, open gyms and even non-volleyball stuff like our internships or doing well in classes. It’s being intentional about getting better. Even when the coaches aren’t around, we have a standard that we hold each other to. You don’t go below it. It’s the integrity in what you do when no one’s watching.”
It’s how growth happens.
The daughter of a pair of former SEC student-athletes, Witherspoon was certainly well prepared for the college experience when she enrolled early and arrived in January 2025. The former prep player of the year in Missouri made an immediate impact, one of only six Commodores to play in all 27 matches and at least 100 sets a season ago. But she also went through the wringer in the process, enduring stretches where she got into her own head seeking perfection and “analysis paralysis,” as she puts it, made her feel almost like a stranger in her own body on the court.
Nelson recalled seeing her begin to find her rhythm late in the season. She pointed to recent months as pivotal, as she figured out and tested her own limits and asserted herself in settings like the weight room or open gyms instead of worrying about standards of perfection. Both are right. And whether from strength coaches or captains, reviews suggest the outside who takes the court against Charleston on Aug. 28 will be a much improved version of the one who was already impressing by the time of last year’s SEC Tournament.
“During the summer, I just ask for positive feedback, and I keep hearing her name—so that is pretty fun,” Nelson said. “I can tell she’s using the resources she has and doing what she can to put herself in the best position possible.”
For Witherspoon and her teammates, it’s all part of the same development process that helped Vandy assistant coach Azhani Tealer grow from early ups and downs as a player at Kentucky into one of the best players in Major League Volleyball or former Nelson pupil Avery Skinner go from promising college freshman to United States Olympian.
Not that Witherspoon or any other Commodore needs to worry about matching those feats. They just need to want to see what is possible if they keep improving.
Career achievements aren’t the standard. Wins alone aren’t the standard. They’re the byproduct of being in an environment where there are standards.
The Opportunity Ahead
First, you clear the land. Then you build.
It doesn’t work in any other order.
At Vanderbilt, a new generation of fans have seen what a volleyball team looks like. Now, if all goes according to plan, they’re going to see what it looks like when a team grows.
“You’re going to see year-to-year change and growth,” Nelson said. “I say that like it’s certain because I know it is—I know people are getting better and developing in our program because I see it every day.
“You’re going to see a difference in how our team plays, of course, and that mindset is the part we’re obsessing over right now. But you’re going see the difference in how they compete, how they handle failure, how they interact with their teammates and fans after the match. If you truly look, you’re going to see these differences in everything we do.”
Vanderbilt volleyball is again part of the landscape. It’s here to stay. It will be the people who change, year after year and team after team, pushing each other to get better.
As the second season begins, 17 women are trying to provide the blueprint.
They want to set the standard.
About Anchored for Her
Through Anchored for Her, a comprehensive fundraising campaign, Vanderbilt is positioning volleyball and its broader women’s athletics programs as national leaders in advancing women’s sports. Anchored for Her’s initial $50 million goal will fuel investment in sustainable success for a new era of collegiate athletics through facility enhancements, endowed scholarships, coaching and staff positions, capital support and naming opportunities, team-specific Excellence Funds, the Women’s Athletics General Fund and the Competitive Excellence Fund.