New Longhorn of the Week: Taylor Harvey

This week's feature for New Longhorn of the Week is freshman MB Taylor Harvey from Salt Lake City, Utah. She is the #1 ranked MB in the 2025 class on VBAdrenaline.com, she won Gatorade's 2024 Utah Player of the Year, and was named a 2024 AVCA First-Team High School All-American. So yeah, that's three separate sources that agree she's pretty good at volleyball.

And if you look at her family, that comes as no surprise. Her parents both played collegiate sports, but it goes deeper than that. Taylor's cousin is Aaron Gordon, an NBA champion with the Denver Nuggets, and her older sister Jordyn is a starting OPP at Stanford. Her family has played a huge influence on her athletic journey, especially her dad.

Taylor got started in sports at a super young age, saying "I've been playing basketball since before I can even remember." For her whole life, her dad has been her basketball coach, and Taylor wouldn't have it any other way. "He's taught me so much in preparing for the next level... the fight, how to be a hard worker, how to be a competitor... my personality of being a fighter and being competitive has definitely come from him."

It wasn't until she got serious about recruiting for college that she started fully committing to volleyball over basketball. In that process, coming to Austin for a camp and being able to interact with the coaches and players played a huge role in her decision to come to Texas. "They took us exactly like how they go through their practice, and really just let us jump in with them, and it was a super high level of intensity," which made her think "this is exactly my vibe when I'm playing, the competitiveness... being competitive through the net and then afterward, we're chill."

Taylor loved the energy of not only the practice, but the city as a whole. She said Austin’s “Keep Austin Weird” vibe felt like a perfect match for her own personality, and the energy of the place just clicked.

Notably, Taylor is the only freshman that is not yet on campus. She won't get into the practice gym until the summer, but she had very good reason for staying, mainly her last high school basketball season. Her high school team, Bountiful, was coming off of back-to-back state championships heading into this season, but Taylor remained hungry for one more. "With this group of girls I've been playing with forever, and my dad being the coach, I just really wanted to finish it strong and go for another state championship... It's such a tight-knit community here, and everyone's so supportive and I wanted to value every moment with them" And it was clearly the right call, because Bountiful completed the three-peat for a storybook ending to Taylor's high school career.

Despite not being in Austin right now, she's doing everything possible to make sure she's not missing out by staying home this spring. She's been keeping in touch with the team's strength and conditioning coach to give her workouts to ensure she's in peak athletic shape and can hit the ground running when she gets to Austin.

And when she gets to Texas, she'll arrive with experience at a level of volleyball even higher than college. This spring, she's been training with LOVB Salt Lake as they've gone through their first ever pro season, and that experience for Taylor has been "eye-opening." She says the biggest thing she's learned has been "maturity" – things like how professional players communicate with each other, adjust to difficult situations, and the overall speed of the game.

She's made it a point to be involved in every huddle to see how the team reacts and communicates, and what their mindset is throughout a match. Another point for her was learning from their scouting. In club and high school ball, you don't often get to scout your opponent fully before matches, but it's an emphasis in college and certainly the pros. She's gotten familiar with the process of learning about an opponent and how to adjust when that gameplan doesn't work out as planned.

That focus on high-level communication and awareness has already started shaping the way Taylor approaches her own team. She’s brought those lessons back to her club, becoming more intentional about reading the room and supporting her teammates, thinking things like "What does my libero need from me right now in this moment? Is she stressed? Can I take some load off of her?" These things will be put into action next weekend when her club team gets the opportunity to compete at a hometown 18s Nationals in Salt Lake.

Now, with high school just about wrapped, club season ending, and pro-level experience under her belt, Taylor Harvey is almost ready to start her next chapter. When she steps onto the Forty Acres, she won’t just be the nation’s top-ranked middle blocker. She’ll be a battle-tested competitor, a multi-time champion, and a Longhorn through and through.