Introducing Kids to Club Volleyball: What I Learned As A First-Time Sport Parent
The rain was dripping down the collar of my jacket as my 12-year-old, Lila, leaned against the car in the rec center parking lot, arms crossed. She’d just quit rec soccer after a season of sitting on the bench, hadn’t made the middle school basketball team, and had spent the previous two weeks camped on the couch watching TikTok after homework. I’d seen a Facebook post for a local club volleyball’s new player tryouts, and on a whim, signed her up. “I don’t know how to play,” she said, scuffing her sneaker on the asphalt. “All these girls have been playing forever. I’m gonna look stupid.” I handed her the pair of hand-me-down knee pads my neighbor had dropped off that morning. “We leave after 15 minutes if you hate it. I’ll buy you that big chocolate chip cookie from the gas station on the way home, no strings attached.”
I sat up in the bleachers with the other waiting parents, expecting what I’d seen in all those high school sport movies – coaches yelling, parents shouting from the sidelines, girls crying when they messed up. But the head coach was already splitting the group of 12 new girls into small teams, and the first thing he said was that there would be no scrimmage scores kept that night. Every time someone missed a hit, he made the whole group clap and say “next one”. After an hour, Lila came out, her ponytail fallen out, a purple bruise already blooming on her shin, and she wiped her sweaty hand on my jeans and said “I want to do this.”
I went into this whole thing with a ton of biases. I thought club volleyball was only for parents pushing their kids to get college scholarships, that it would take over every weekend and cost a thousand dollars before we even played our first game. I didn’t want to become that person who schedules family vacations around tournament dates, or yells at a 13-year-old from the bleachers for missing a serve.
But what I found out is that most local clubs have multiple tiers of teams. There are the elite teams that practice four times a week and travel every other weekend for national tournaments, but there are also development teams that practice twice a week after school and play one local tournament a month. That’s what Lila’s on. We still have most weekends free for her art class, for camping trips, for lazy Sunday mornings. The concrete thing I tell other parents now: before you sign anything, ask the club director straight up how many of their teams are focused on new player development, not just winning. I almost made that mistake at first, almost signed up for a higher tier team that would have been way too much for us, just because I didn’t know to ask.
Another practical thing I figured out early: gear doesn’t have to be new. Almost every club has a used gear swap group, either on Facebook or in their team emails. Lila’s knee pads, her volleyball shoes, even her team jersey came from a 14-year-old who graduated to a higher team. We paid $25 total for everything, instead of the $180 the pro shop wanted for new gear. Lila even kept the tiny unicorn sticker the previous owner had put on the knee pad. Most clubs also don’t advertise sliding scale fee options, but if you ask, almost all have them for families that can’t afford the full registration cost. It’s not something they shout about, but it’s almost always there.
Last month, we played our first tournament as a team. We lost in the second round, when Lila went up for the game-winning hit and missed the ball entirely. I stood by the car waiting for her, already thinking about how I’d console her, already ready to stop for that cookie she liked. But she came out of the gym laughing, already texting the team group chat to ask if everyone wanted to meet for ice cream at the shop down the street. “Everyone missed something today,” she told me, scraping the bottom of her cone. “It’s not just my fault we lost. The girls don’t care.”
That hit me, because before this, Lila would have locked herself in her room for a full day after messing up something that public. She’s always been the kid who wants to be perfect the first time she tries anything, and quits if she’s not. Volleyball doesn’t let you do that. You can’t hide on the court – every rotation you have to touch the ball, you have to talk to your teammates, you have to try again even if you just missed three serves in a row.
One small thing I recommend any parent do before committing: don’t just talk to the coach about the team, sit in on 15 minutes of a practice first. Watch how the coach reacts when a kid messes up. If they yell, or make the kid sit out for messing up, that’s not the team for a new player. If they laugh it off, show them how to do it better, and move on, that’s the one you want. It takes 15 minutes, and it tells you way more than any glossy brochure will.
Lila’s season ends in three weeks, and she hasn’t decided yet if she wants to play again next year. Some weeks she complains that practice is too early on Tuesdays, that her legs hurt, that she’d rather just stay home and hang out with her best friend. Other weeks she comes home bouncing off the walls talking about how they won a scrimmage, how she served three times in a row and didn’t miss once. I don’t push her either way. If she quits, that’s fine – we still got a year of her learning that it’s okay to be the new kid, that messing up in front of other people doesn’t break you. I never thought I’d be the parent sitting in a cold gym bleachers for three hours on a Saturday, scrolling my phone while waiting for a tournament to end, but it’s worked out better than I ever expected. If you’ve got a kid that’s bored with their current sport, or just stuck in a rut after school, it’s worth checking out. You don’t have to commit to anything long term. Just sign up for a tryout, bring money for the post-tryout cookie, and see what happens.
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