Introducing Kids to Club Volleyball: What I Learned As A First-Time Sports Parent
The rubber gym floor stuck to the bottom of my sneakers as I leaned against the cold bleachers last January, watching my 12-year-old Lila hover by the water cooler at her first club volleyball tryout. She’d only ever played rec league on a bumpy church lawn, where the biggest pressure was remembering to rotate before the other team served. Half the girls here already had matching custom team bags and knee pads that didn’t have cartoon unicorns printed on them. I checked my watch for the third time in five minutes, wondering if I’d just wasted $50 on a tryout fee that would end with her crying in the car on the way home. I’d heard all the horror stories about club volleyball: parents screaming at refs from the stands, 13-year-olds burning out from 20-hour practice weeks, thousands of dollars spent on travel that only pays off if you get a college scholarship (which less than 2% of high school players do, I’d Googled it at 2 a.m. the night before).
Lila had begged me for three months to let her try out. Her rec coach had pulled me aside after the last game and said she had quick reflexes and didn’t get frustrated when she messed up, two things most 12-year-olds don’t have. I kept putting it off, convinced club was only for super serious kids who wanted to build a career around volleyball, not a kid who still stops every five minutes to pick dandelions on the walk home from school. But she kept asking, so I finally filled out the form.
She made the lower-level B team, not the competitive A team. I sighed a little at first, then realized that was perfect. The commitment was two weeknights a week for two hours, and one out-of-town tournament a month, not the four nights a week the A team did. First practice, she came out with grass stains on her new shoes and a big grin, said the coach taught her how to do a proper pass, and one of the other girls shared her extra hair ties.
Our first tournament tested every part of my new hobby of being a club parent. We got up at 6 a.m., drove two hours to a recreation complex in the next state, and Lila forgot her knee pads in the car. We had to buy a $20 pair at the front door, another hidden cost I hadn’t planned for. She missed her first two serves, sat on the bench twisting her hair for the next three rotations. By the third game, she got a clean kill off a bad set from the other team, and the whole bench jumped up yelling so loud I could hear it from the stands. On the way out to the parking lot, she didn’t talk about the missed serves. She talked about how the senior captain on the team high-fived her after that hit.
That’s when I realized I’d had it all wrong. Most kids who join club volleyball aren’t going to play in college. Most teams aren’t run by screamers who care more about wins than the kids. For a lot of us, it’s just a good structured activity that teaches kids stuff they don’t get in the classroom or casual rec league.
I learned a few concrete things along the way that I wish someone had told me before I signed Lila up. First, don’t jump straight into a full-season tryout with a big expensive club. Most local programs run 4-6 week introductory clinics for new players for $50 to $100 total, no travel required. If your kid hates it, you’re out a little money and a few evenings, no big deal. If they love it, you already know what the coach and other kids are like before you commit to a whole season.
Second, if your kid makes a lower-level team, don’t push them to re-try for a higher spot the next year unless they ask. I almost did this after the first month, when Lila said she was having fun. I almost said “maybe next year we can try for A” because I was worried she wasn’t reaching her potential. But then I realized she doesn’t care about potential right now. She cares that her team does a group ice cream after every win, even if the win is against a team that’s just as new as they are. If she wants to move up later, she can. Forcing it just makes it feel like work, not fun.
Third, agree on one non-negotiable rule before you start: on the drive home from tournaments or practice, you don’t talk about mistakes first. Instead of opening with “why did you miss that last serve?” you open with “what’s the coolest thing that happened today?” If they want to talk about the bad stuff, they’ll bring it up. Lila once lost every game at a three-game tournament, and she cried in the car for 10 minutes before she said she thought all the losses were her fault. I didn’t brush it off or give her a pep talk. I just said “that sucks, I’d be really upset too” and stopped at McDonald’s for her favorite McFlurry. That’s all she wanted.
I noticed a quiet change in her after a couple of months, outside the gym. Lila used to get so upset when she got a question wrong in math class that she’d put her head down and not raise her hand again the whole period. After two months of club, I asked her how school was, and she said she messed up a presentation in front of the whole class, and it was embarrassing, but she just finished it and sat down. She said “it’s not like missing a serve, right? Everyone just forgets it after five minutes.” That’s the kind of stuff you can’t teach sitting at a kitchen table doing homework. That’s the stuff you learn when you mess up in front of 20 other people and still get to go back to the line for the next serve.
It’s not all perfect, of course. We have to skip family pizza night every Tuesday and Thursday for practice. Some months the tournament fees and new gear add up to more than our monthly grocery bill. Some nights Lila is so tired after practice she falls asleep on the couch before she finishes her homework, and I have to wake her up to get her into bed. She hasn’t said yet if she wants to play again next season. Some weeks she says it’s the best thing she ever did, some weeks she says it’s too much work and she wants to quit.
Right now, we’re taking it one tournament at a time. If she quits after this season, that’s fine. She got to learn how to serve, she got to hang out with kids who like the same thing she does, and she learned that messing up in front of people doesn’t end the world. If she comes back next year, we’ll figure out the schedule, we’ll budget for the fees, and I’ll bring extra sunscreen and extra knee pads to every tournament. That’s enough for me right now.
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