Why I Finally Got Over Myself And Signed My Kid Up For Club Volleyball
I spent all of last fall avoiding club volleyball. Like, actively avoiding. My 12-year-old Lila had played rec league for two years, and after the last game of the season she was bouncing on the bleachers, crumpled cheese cracker wrapper in one hand, grass stuck to her sweaty ankle sock, and said “all the girls from my team are signing up for club. Can I please?” And I laughed and said we’d think about it, then went home and googled “is club volleyball only for crazy parents” and closed the tab after the first search result that mentioned a mom getting banned from a regional tournament for yelling at a 16-year-old ref.
I knew a mom from the playground whose daughter played club, so I texted her asking for the unfiltered tea, and she sent me the registration link and the fee sheet. I stared at that number for 12 straight days. I’d open the PDF while I was waiting for Lila to get out of piano lessons, close it, eat a chocolate chip cookie out of the freezer, open it again. I made an appointment to go check out an open practice, and when I got there I accidentally walked into the wrong gym – the elite 16U gym, where all the girls could jump higher than my shoulders – and a dad in a fancy embroidered club polo asked me what position my daughter was trying out for, and I panicked and said “oh, she’s just here to use the bathroom” and practically ran out. Found the right 12U gym 10 minutes later, all flustered and red in the face.
Lila’s tryout was fine. She’s not the best. She can’t jump super high, her serve goes into the net half the time, she still gets distracted by butterflies outside the gym window mid-drill. But she came out bouncing, hair sticking up everywhere, and said she had more fun in those two hours than she had all season in rec, where half the girls didn’t even show up to half the games. So I signed the forms, wrote the check, and my hand shook the whole time I was typing in my card number.
The first few weeks were messy, just like I thought they’d be. Six a.m. practices every Saturday. Let me repeat that. SIX A.M. I used to sleep until 8 on Saturdays, make blueberry pancakes, read a dumb romance novel on the couch while Lila watched cartoons. Now I’m up at 4:45, scraping ice off the windshield in January, fumbling for coffee that’s way too strong because I chug it while I’m driving. First practice Lila forgot her knee pads, we had to run 20 minutes back home, I was screaming the whole way, thought we’d get kicked out, turned out the coach was late too because her own kid had a middle of the night fever. No one cared. I brought homemade chocolate chip cookies to the first team potluck and forgot I’d put walnuts in them, right when a kid with a severe nut allergy reached for one. I was mortified, but everyone just shrugged and said it’s fine, we always have the epi pen on hand, accidents happen.
Yeah, the stereotypes are partially true. There’s that one dad, the one who yells at every ref call, even the obvious ones that everyone in the stands can see is correct. It’s expensive. We cut two of our streaming services, we skipped the annual camping trip we do every July up at the lake, I buy generic cereal now instead of the fancy honey nut kind Lila begs for. Lila didn’t even make the top A team, she’s on the second developmental team, and I was a little disappointed at first, I’ll admit. I sat in the car after team selections thinking all this money and hassle for nothing. But Lila just shrugged when they announced the teams, said “cool, I get to play every set instead of sitting on the bench for two hours, that’s way better.”
Last month we went to our first out-of-town tournament, three hours away, stayed in a cheap motel that had a weird mildew smell by the pool. Their team lost more games than they won. On the drive home, Lila was slumped in the back seat, covered in blue raspberry slushie stain, scrolling through blurry photos her teammate took, and she didn’t even mention that she missed the game-winning serve in the last match. She just kept talking about how after the final game all the girls walked to the gas station down the street and got ice cream, and how their team made up a silly pre-point handshake that makes the coach snort laugh every time. She used to come home from rec league crying if she missed more than one serve, lock herself in her room and say she was terrible at volleyball and never wanted to play again. Now she just laughs it off and says “next time I’ll get it.”
I still have a lot of complaints, if I’m being honest. I hate getting up before the sun comes up on the weekend. I hate that I can’t remember the last time we had a lazy pancake Saturday. I roll my eyes so hard at that yelling dad I’m surprised they don’t get stuck. Sometimes I think maybe I should just pull her out, go back to low-stakes rec, get our weekends back. But then I see her in the driveway after school, hitting the ball against the garage over and over, trying to get her serve right, singing off key to whatever pop song is stuck in her head, and I can’t make myself say it. I don’t know if she’ll play in high school, let alone college, I don’t know if this is some big life-changing character-building moment that she’ll thank me for later. It’s just volleyball. It’s messy, it’s expensive, it messes up your whole schedule. But right now, it’s what she wants. And that’s enough, I guess. (Word count: 1128)
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