Volleyball

Show your love for Haverford Volleyball during the GameDay Fords challenge from February 10-12, 2026! Every gift helps to provide Haverford's student-athletes with the resources to compete at the highest level.

New this year—each Haverford Athletics team will compete with each other for the honor of highest participation on the leaderboard, with special prizes for first place, second place, and most improved.

This year, we started our 2025 season with our 3rd international trip as a program, visiting Budapest, Hungary and Maribor, Slovenia. We had multiple training sessions and matches abroad. We also participated in a strudel cooking class in Budapest, refreshed at a Hungarian bathhouse, explored beautiful monuments and buildings, and went underground in the caves below the city. When we departed Budapest, several of our players said they were going to move to Budapest!

We then traveled to Maribor, Slovenia. We stopped at a beautiful lake for lunch and enjoyed the small town of Maribor along the river. We rode the alpine slide down the hill above the athletic facility, which was a huge highlight! We left Europe incredibly grateful for our time together and even more prepared for our season at home.

This fall, we welcomed our six new first years to campus and to our program. They brought a ton of fun, new energy to the team and meshed well right away. We switched up our annual scavenger hunt this year, and the team loved it.

The preseason was filled with lots of team bonding and growth on the court. We played a competitive non-conference schedule that prepared us well for our conference play. Our big early wins included Stevens, Springfield, Scranton, and Eastern. Our conference is one of the best out there, and we started off battling well. We took a tough loss to the best Dickinson team I’ve seen on October 25th. The team had a choice to make after that match, crumble or bounce back, and boy did we bounce back!

The next Saturday, on senior day, we took down top 10, Johns Hopkins, in 4 sets for the first time since 2008. It was an incredible day for the Fords with so many family members, friends, and fans in the stands to celebrate our four fabulous seniors. That same week, we took down conference foe, Swarthmore, in 3 electric sets. We sure do love beating Swat! We earned a 3rd-place regular-season CC finish, avenged our loss to Dickinson in the first round, and grinded it out with F&M, but ended our season in Lancaster. We were one match away from receiving a bid to the NCAA tournament and finished 48th in the nation.

Elizabeth Cella ’29 was named Centennial Conference Rookie of the Year, First-Team All-Conference, First-Team All- Region, and AVCA All-American Honorable Mention. She is a force for us as a 6-rotation outside. Middle blocker Fiona Moord ’28 was named Second-Team All-Conference, and Gia Frank ’27 was named Honorable Mention All-Conference.

While the wins and awards are awesome, the highlight of this season is how close our team became and how much love they had for each other. Our relationships are really important to us and will just continue to grow. With many starters returning and a very competitive incoming class, we are ready and excited for our 2026 season.

You can help us continue to achieve success with a gift to Volleyball during GameDay Fords. Every gift makes a difference to our program.

Go Fords!

Drew Hargrave