Ashley Pater has always been ambitious, especially when it comes to beach volleyball.
She started her volleyball career indoors when she was eight, but also sampled a variety of other sports. Pater started playing beach volleyball with her older sister Brooke, her first partner, at age 10. She transitioned completely to beach volleyball when she was 12, where her father, Todd, took notice of her passion for the sand.
“When she decided to go full beach, by the time she was probably 12, I knew there was something different about her as a person and athlete, and definitely her love for the sport,” Todd said. “So she just kinda dove all in.”
Pater had always grown up with sports, especially since both of her parents grew up playing sports; her mom Lorraine grew up playing volleyball, while Todd played college football at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Pater gives a lot of credit to her parents for their unwavering dedication to her as she went all-in on beach volleyball.
“They have been super, super supportive,” Pater said. “Our parents drove and flew us across the country just to let us play against the best of the best players, and I feel like that’s really, really helped because Florida has great, great competition, but California, Texas… I mean, there’s a lot of studs around the country, and I think getting to play against the best has really helped improve my game a lot.”
As Pater got older, she started playing with Jordan Bolware, a future Florida State commit, from 2019 to 2021, with whom she would go on to win five 14U national beach volleyball titles.
In 2021, the two would split up. Since they were both built more for defense, they wanted to start playing with taller partners who could play at the net while they patrolled the backcourt.
All of the work that Pater put in for beach volleyball would eventually go on to pay off, as she was recruited and accepted an offer to play for USC under head coach Dain Blanton.
“She’s just your perfect kind of student-athlete that you can have,” Blanton said. “She takes care of business, she’s professional, she shows up on time, she’s gonna work as hard as she can, she’s trying to maximize her abilities, she’s trying to reach her potential. The effort she puts out there is awesome and she leads not only verbally, but she leads by example, by going out there and making it happen every time.”
One thing that Pater believes helped her prepare to play at USC was graduating high school a year early, but then taking a gap year that allowed her to train and prepare by practicing and playing in professional tournaments. Pater gives Brooke a lot of credit for helping her organize an online schedule that not only allowed Pater to finish high school early, but also graduate alongside her older sister.
“I trained with a lot of really high-level adults here in Florida during the gap year and they’ve already experienced college and playing professionally and international tournaments, so just being around their mindset and their skills, it really helped me excel and have a really good focus and vision for what I wanted to do going into college,” Pater said.
Once she got to USC, Pater quickly showed off her competitive nature, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. At times, Pater faced an uphill battle and struggled at times, especially being a part of a dynasty program in college beach volleyball.
“I would say at USC, one of the biggest challenges was trusting the process,” Pater said. “I know it’s easy to say, but everyone’s such a grinder and works so hard. Like having the fear of not starting, it’s really, really tough and I think during fall, it was a really big mental rollercoaster.”
Blanton recalls how, despite the early adversity that Pater faced, she responded to it, especially under the guidance of Blanton and his coaching staff.
“Well she wanted success very quickly, right? And when she had some stumbles and defeats, she took it a little heavier than she needed to, but that’s the sign of a champion. She didn’t just say ‘oh, it’s a loss.’ She took it really heavy,” Blanton said. “And you saw by the end of the year that she was starting at the No. 4 spot and just was a tremendous, tremendous asset in terms of us winning the 2024 championship.”
Throughout the year, Pater played primarily with three different partners. Pater’s first partner was Ainsley Radell, a grad transfer from Cal, followed by Madison White, who just completed her sophomore year with USC.
Pater’s third and final partner was Grace Seits, a graduate student who had spent the previous four years at LSU. Pater played with Seits for the final three weeks of the season, and together, the two of them helped USC win both the Pac-12 Championship and the national championship from the No. 4 Court. Pater also made the All-Pac-12 Freshman Team.
“With Ashley being a freshman, we knew she could handle herself and we knew how tenacious of a player she was, but to put her with a steadying force, a fifth-year grad student like Grace Seits who was very focused, who’s all about business, I thought it was a very good complement to one another,” Blanton said of his decision to pair Pater with Seits.
Seits recalls meeting Pater during a beach tournament that she was working at, one Pater competed in, and was excited to get the chance to play with her.
“When I met her, it was honestly super refreshing to see, as a freshman, somebody who really did care so much about this sport and was willing to work her butt off no matter what, and honestly handled the craziness of college athletics so well at such a young age,” Seits said. “So, I kinda knew from that fact that she was gonna be something special as a freshman, miles ahead of where I was when I was a freshman.”
Seits said that she really got to know Pater during a trip to Huntsville for an AVCA Tournament in early November. While the two were not partnered together, Seits said that it allowed her to really get to know her teammate’s hilarious and fun off-the-court personality.
The trip helped the two grow close and form a tight bond, which would serve them well in tough scenarios on the court during the final stretch of the season. This was most notable in the Pac-12 tournament, when the pair lost to rival UCLA duo of Jaden Whitmarsh and Tessa Van Winkle in the semifinals.
After helping each other calm down and reset, Pater and Seits beat Stanford in the contender’s bracket to set up a rematch in the championship dual, where, this time, the Trojans prevailed over the Bruins, with Pater and Seits winning the rematch over Whitmarsh and Van Winkle.
The momentum from the Pac-12 Championship would carry into Gulf Shores for the national championship, where the duo went 3-0 in the matches they completed and helped USC hoist its seventh beach volleyball trophy by getting another win over Whitmarsh and Van Winkle in a hard fought battle over UCLA in the final.
“Right after the match, I just happened to be standing right there when she gets interviewed on TV, she’s able to come up and give me a big hug, and it was just a very special moment,” Todd said of witnessing his daughter’s success at Gulf Shores. “You almost felt like the last eight years of her life came down to that moment, and it was just so much relief to see her have success and everything that she’s worked hard for. So that was a pretty cool hug.”
Outside of volleyball, Pater enjoys hanging out with her friends, working out, and is a big fan of Suits and South Park. She also said that she finds house flipping fascinating, which is why she decided to major in real estate. She is also pursuing an accounting minor after enjoying an accounting class she took during her first year at USC.
After graduating from USC in 2027, Pater plans to pursue a professional career in beach volleyball, playing both in the U.S. and abroad. She also hopes to qualify for the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane, Australia.
Right now, her focus is on continuing to improve her game for the 2025 season with USC, as the Trojans will try to pull off a five-peat. She has spent the summer playing in AVP tournaments with Sarah Wood, a 2026 uncommitted beach volleyball recruit. The pair recently had a runner-up finish in Denver and placed third in Waupaca.
As Pater prepares to lead a very underclassmen-heavy team next spring while USC transitions from the Pac-12 to the MPSF — the Big Ten does not have beach volleyball — Seits only sees the sky as the limit for her final collegiate volleyball partner.
“I think that her ceiling is so incredibly high and the whole USC team is fully prepared to keep running this program to greatness and the potential for more national championships is so high,” Seits said.
Pater will be back with the Trojans next February when the beach volleyball team takes to the sand to kick off its 2025 season in an effort to win its fifth straight national championship.