On Senior Day, Stanford beach volleyball begins with breakfast. Then comes the scrapbooks.
Each senior receives a personalized collection of letters, photos and handwritten pages assembled by teammates. It’s a tradition that reflects the culture, senior captain Ashley Vincent said, that defines the program more than any win or ranking ever could.
“It just shows how much time and effort people put into making sure that everybody leaves this experience of being on the team feeling so appreciated and sustained,” Vincent said.
After breakfast, the team piles into decorated cars, blasting music through open windows, parading themselves around campus to celebrate the years their seniors dedicated to Stanford beach volleyball.
To outsiders, silly traditions like this may sound almost absurd for a team competing at the highest level of collegiate beach volleyball. But for Vincent, they represent something essential about Stanford’s identity, and something essential to how she’ll remember her time here.
Beach volleyball, she explained, is inherently competitive even within a single roster. With only a handful of lineup spots available, teammates compete against each other daily in practice.
“There’s kind of only one way into the lineup,” Vincent said. “Everybody is fighting through this one bottleneck.”
That dynamic can fracture teams. Vincent believes Stanford has managed to avoid that by placing team culture above individual competition.
“We have such a focus on separating our competitive spirit from team culture,” she said. “Team culture is first priority.”
Vincent, elected captain by her teammates this season, sees leadership on Stanford’s roster as collective rather than hierarchical. Some players lead through their play, others through organization or emotional support. The expectation, she said, is that everyone contributes to maintaining the standard.
“It’s kind of been a team of leaders,” Vincent said.
Her teammates’ decision to select her as captain remains one of the accomplishments she values most during her Stanford career, even alongside conference titles, program milestones and a No. 1 national ranking.
“When I think back to what I’m really the proudest of, I think it’s that my peers wanted me to represent such a special group of people,” she said.
Off the sand, Vincent found another way to merge teamwork with personal passion.
A computer science coterminal student returning to Stanford for a fifth year, Vincent spent last summer conducting research through the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance. Using motion-capture data collected from Stanford volleyball athletes, she worked on retraining a graphical neural network to predict the biomechanics of volleyball attacks.
The project combined two parts of her life that had previously existed separately: years of competitive volleyball training and years of studying computer science.
“To combine them was super cool,” Vincent said. “It gave me a different outlook on training with volleyball and the potential for where it could go with future technology.”
Stanford coaches were equally enthusiastic, offering team video and support as Vincent explored how advanced analytics and biomechanics could someday become integrated into everyday training.
Still, when Vincent reflects on her Stanford experience, she returns less to the accolades or research opportunities than to the people around her.
Over the past two years, Vincent has lived with three close friends — including current and former Stanford volleyball players — whom she describes as family.
“They became my biggest support system,” Vincent said. “They’ve taught me how to be selfless.”
Next year, Vincent will remain at Stanford to complete her coterminal degree in computer science while beginning a new chapter away from collegiate volleyball. This summer, she will intern at a financial software startup, an environment she hopes mirrors the closeness and collaboration she found within Stanford beach volleyball.
For Vincent, that sense of connection is ultimately what made the program special.
“We take the best parts of ourselves and bring them together to create something so big and special,” she said.