TEMPE, Ariz. -- Stanford senior Maya Harvey has been named the 2024 Pac-12 Beach Volleyball Scholar-Athlete of the Year, the conference announced on Thursday. The Pac-12 Scholar-Athlete of the Year award is presented annually to the conference's top senior beach volleyball student-athlete.
Harvey is the first-ever recipient of the award in program history and with the Cardinal's move to the MPSF for the 2025 season, the final ever Stanford selection for the honor. Stanford assistant coach Jo Kremer was the 2018 honoree for the award as a student-athlete at USC.
The Hermosa Beach, Calif. native is a Computer Science coterm, working on both her bachelor's and master's degree and carries a 3.666 undergraduate GPA and a 4.171 graduate GPA.
One of the winningest players in program history, Harvey's impact on the Stanford beach volleyball team will be felt for years to come. Maya has been a strong cog in the Stanford lineups since the day she stepped on campus, playing at least 25 games per year, and was a large part of aiding the program to four-straight 20+ win seasons and three consecutive NCAA Championship appearances.
Off the courts, Harvey has excelled in the classroom while gaining incredible experience with the wealth of opportunities presented in Silicon Valley. She was a Full Stack Web Development Intern at UBS, implementing the "View Beneficiaries" page for UBS's Wealth Management Americas online service website.
Harvey also enjoys video game design and implementation and has created a 2D platformer videogame in just three weeks including an original narrative, art, puzzles, music, and code. She also has experience with bare metal programming on Raspberry Pi and is fluent with hardware communications, validating scancodes and data bits, processing key events, drawing to bitmap frame buffers, and sending messages to the GPU. Lastly, Harvey has done FinTech and Hardware Research as well as projects with Blender and Houdini.
Post graduation, Maya plans to work on her startup ideas in Southern California and improve her surfing skills. but won't be too far from the Farm as she will return to Stanford next year to finish her master's degree in Computer Science. She will be a course assistant for Stanford's Intro to Game Design class while working to complete her graduate degree.
The Pac-12 selects Scholar Athletes of the Year in 24 sponsored sports: baseball, men's basketball, women's basketball, men's cross country, women's cross country, beach volleyball, football, men's golf, women's golf, women's gymnastics, women's lacrosse, men's rowing, women's rowing, men's soccer, women's soccer, softball, men's swimming and diving, women's swimming and diving, men's tennis, women's tennis, men's track and field, women's track and field, women's volleyball, and wrestling.
The nomination criteria are: senior (in athletics eligibility) on track to receive a degree, cumulative grade point average of 3.0 or higher, participation in at least 50 percent of the scheduled contest in the sport, and a minimum of one year in residence at the institution.
Each Pac-12 institution nominates one individual per sport, and the winners are selected by a committee of Pac-12 staff members at the conclusion of each sport's regular season. The athletic and academic accomplishments of the nominees are a consideration in the voting for the award.