Introducing Your Kids to Club Volleyball: Parent Tips From My Family’s First Year
The gym door clicked shut behind us last January, and the smell of old rubber soles and lemon disinfectant hit my 12-year-old Lila and me square in the face. She picked at the chipped lavender nail polish on her thumb and squeezed the brand-new knee pads I’d just dropped $40 on, jaw tight. “What if everyone’s already better than me?” she mumbled. I’d spent the previous three weeks scrolling parent forums panicking about the same thing: I’d heard club volleyball was for serious athletes only, it cost a fortune, it turned fun games into stressful second jobs. Lila had played rec volleyball for a year, kept saying her team only practiced once every two weeks and half the girls spent the whole time gossiping by the net. She wanted more. I just wasn’t sure club was the right more.
I’d decided to test the waters first, anyway, after a friend who’d done club with her own kid told me most local clubs offer open trial periods for new players, not just full-year contracts up front. The club 20 minutes from our house let Lila drop in for three practices for $10 each, no commitment required. I told her if she hated it after three, we’d get her favorite mint chocolate chip ice cream on the way home and go back to rec, no hard feelings. That low-stakes start took a lot of pressure off both of us, and it’s the first thing I tell other parents now when they ask about getting started.
I sat in the bleachers that first practice folding Lila’s laundry for the week, waiting for the meltdown. The first serve drill, Lila shanked a serve that hit the Gatorade cooler on the bench, and the whole team laughed. I tensed up, ready to jump down and grab her bag, but Lila just grinned and yelled “my bad!” before jogging back to position. After practice, she talked the whole car ride home about how the coach didn’t stop the entire drill to yell, just pulled her aside after to show her how to toss the ball a little higher. One of the older girls on the team stayed 10 minutes late to show her how to set a better platform for passing. I left that day realizing I’d bought into a lot of wrong ideas about club volleyball already.
I’d worried about cost and time, too. As a working single mom, I didn’t have thousands of dollars to drop on a sport Lila might quit in three months, and I didn’t have time to drive to the gym three nights a week. What I didn’t know is that almost every club splits teams by skill and commitment level: there are elite teams for kids gunning for college scholarships, but most also have developmental teams for kids who just want to play more than rec offers, at a fraction of the cost. The developmental team we ended up joining was $800 for the whole season, that includes all practice and tournament fees, which was less than I paid for Lila’s year of piano lessons. For the driving, I connected with three other parents from our school district whose kids were on the same team, and we set up a carpool: each parent drives once a week, so I only make the 20-minute trip once instead of three times. For overnight tournaments, we split hotel rooms and take turns driving, which cuts costs and stress even more.
What surprised me most, though, was how much Lila grew off the court. She’s always been the kid who’d rather fail a test than raise her hand and ask for help in class. On the volleyball court, you can’t do that. If you don’t call the ball, two people go for it and it hits the floor. If you don’t tell your coach your ankle hurts, you’ll play on it and make it worse. After a couple of months, her math teacher emailed me to say Lila had stayed after class to ask for extra help with algebra, something she’d never done once in middle school. When I asked her about it later, she shrugged and said she’d gotten used to asking for what she needed at practice, so it didn’t feel scary anymore. She also had to learn to manage her time: practice runs from 6 to 8 three nights a week, so she has to get all her homework done between 3:30 and 6, instead of scrolling TikTok for two hours after school like she used to. Her grades went up a little this semester, which I never would have predicted.
Last month, we drove two hours to a tournament in the rain, got lost and showed up 10 minutes late for the first match. The team lost the first three games, and Lila missed the game-winning serve that would have moved them into the semifinals. I waited by the exit ready to take her out for pizza and cheer her up, expecting tears. She came out laughing with the rest of her team, arguing about whether the other team’s server had stepped over the line on the final point, and already making plans for get-togethers after the next tournament. No one blamed her, she didn’t mope, and we got donuts on the way home like nothing bad had happened. That’s the part no one tells you about club volleyball, I think: it’s not about winning, it’s about getting used to messing up in front of people and moving on.
Last week, Lila came home from school and said the art teacher is starting an after-school art club that meets the same night as her second weekly practice. She said she’s thinking about quitting volleyball next year to do art full time. I told her that’s fine, we can try that. It’s not like we wasted the year. She learned how to ask for help, how to lose without crumbling, how to fit homework into a busy day. If she never touches a volleyball again after this season, that’s okay. Next time she wants to try something new, we’ll do the same thing we did this time: test it out for a few weeks, don’t sink all our money in up front, share the work with other parents, and see how it goes. I don’t know if she’ll stick with sports long term, but this year, it worked for us.
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