Summary

• Vanderbilt volleyball returns after a 45-year hiatus with a historic outdoor home opener on Wyatt Lawn against Belmont.
• Head coach Anders Nelson has built a 17-player roster over three years, aiming to launch a competitive program backed by strong community support.

This Friday night’s match is no ordinary home opener; it will mark the first home match (and second overall) that the Vanderbilt Commodores will have played since 1980, when the school’s first attempt at a volleyball program was cut after just one season.

It’s been 45 years, but Vanderbilt feels confident that this is the right moment to bring volleyball back into the school’s athletic department, which is home to a slew of successful programs in the SEC.

Head coach Anders Nelson was tapped to run the program in 2022, after helping the University of Kentucky win the national championships in 2020. He has spent the past three years on campus working with student-athletes (transfers, red-shirts and incoming freshmen) and preparing the school for the program’s restart.

And he feels confident that Vanderbilt is a fertile ground for a program renewal. “Vanderbilt attracts people that want to be great at everything they do,” he told WSMV4. “It brought them to so many people [who are] … amazingly determined to get what they want.”

Some of those people Anders refers to are the players who comprise his new team: 17 athletes, including ten who arrived on campus for the 2024-25 school year to redshirt, train and adjust to the new school. Additionally, a handful of early commits and mid-year transfers joined the team in early 2025.

These players include Jackie Moore, who transferred from Loyola Marymount to Vanderbilt to play out her final year of eligibility; Sydney Conley, who comes from Florida State, and Isabella Bareford, who joins the team from Loyola Marymount University. “We have 17 athletes who care deeply about this program,” Nelson said, as reported by The Nashville Post. “And we cannot wait to showcase our hard work in front of a hometown crowd that has already shown our program so much support.”

And showcase they will. On Friday, the team will not only play its first home game on campus in 45 years, but it will do so outside, on the campus’s Wyatt Lawn.

When asked why he chose to start the season this way, Nelson said that he wanted to make a splash. “Admin came to me and said, ‘we want this to be a special moment for campus,” Nelson explained to The Tennessean. “So why don’t we host it in the middle of campus?”

Wyatt Lawn will play host to a historic opener.

When the Commodores face the Belmont Bruins on Friday night, they hope to do so in front of a large, lively crowd in one of Vanderbilt’s most iconic locations. they plan to play hard, building off of strong performances from Moore and Reese Animashaun in the season opener.

Vanderbilt will quickly see action again after Friday’s night game under the lights; on Sunday, the Commodores will play Illinois as part of the Broadway Block Party at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville.

Right now, the Commodores are just focused on Friday. But they’ll look to be remembered this season for more than just their inauguration