Is Club Volleyball Right For Your Kid? A Parent’s Honest Guide To Getting Started
The crumpled soccer tryout rejection slip was stuck to the bottom of Lila’s backpack last March, and I found it while she sat at the kitchen table picking cheddar Goldfish crumbs out of her hoodie. She’d talked for months about making the 7th grade team, and when she saw I’d found it, she just shrugged and said “I knew I’d suck at running laps anyway.” My college roommate, who has two kids in local youth sports, texted me 10 minutes later: Bring her to the 12U club volleyball open gym this weekend. No pressure, just come hit some balls. I’d heard all the horror stories about club sports: six-hour car rides to tournaments, five-thousand-dollar yearly fees, parents screaming at refs from the bleachers. I almost said no.
We drove to the rec center that Saturday, and it smelled like rubber floor and lemon cleaning spray, just like every gym I’d ever been in. A vending machine by the bleachers stocked stale Cheetos and warm Gatorade, and half the parents were on their laptops answering work emails while the kids warmed up. Lila hung back by the door, wearing her scuffed soccer cleats because we didn’t have proper volleyball shoes, and crossed her arms when I nudged her toward the group. The coach, a 20-year-old college player who worked part-time with the club, spotted her, grabbed an extra pair of knee pads from a bin by the bench, and walked over. He just said, “We’ve got room for one more. Come mess up as many passes as you want, no one’s keeping score today.”
The first 15 minutes were rough. Lila tripped over her own feet, missed three out of every four passes, and kept glancing over at me like she wanted to leave. Then one of the veteran girls overthrew a warm-up pass, and it was heading straight for the water cooler by the wall. Lila reacted without thinking, reached up, and slapped it back over the net right into the coach’s hands. The whole group clapped, and I watched Lila’s shoulders drop. She relaxed. By the end of the open gym, she was begging me to let her come back.
I sat down with the club director a week later, expecting a hard sell for the elite travel team, and he told me something I’d never known. Almost every local club has multiple tiers, not just the top team that heads to national championships. This one had a developmental team for kids who just want to play, no out-of-state travel, one practice a week, and one local tournament a month at a high school 20 minutes from our house. The fee was $400 for the whole season, which is less than we spent on a week of soccer camp the summer before. That’s the first thing I tell any parent asking me about club volleyball now: call around and ask about entry-level options before you write it off as too expensive or too intense.
I also didn’t run out to buy full-priced gear the first week. That’s another concrete tip: we borrowed knee pads from my roommate’s daughter, who’d outgrown them, and I bought an $18 decent volleyball from Target. Lila wore her old cross-training sneakers for the first three months, until she told me she wanted her own pair of volleyball shoes for her birthday. Most clubs have a bin of extra gear for new kids to borrow, so there’s no need to drop hundreds of dollars before you know your kid will stick with it.
Lila has always hated being bad at new things. She’d rather quit than ask for help, because she’s scared of looking stupid in front of people. After the first month of practice, I noticed something shift. The coach doesn’t yell corrections across the gym at kids. If someone’s form is off, he pulls them aside for a minute after the drill, walks through the adjustment slowly, and has them try three times before sending them back. One night at dinner, Lila told me she’d stayed after math class that day to ask the teacher to re-explain slope, because “it’s okay to not get it the first time, right? Coach does that all the time.” That’s the unexpected side effect I never would have guessed: the way small, consistent feedback on the court translated to more confidence in the classroom.
Last month, we lost our first tournament on the very last serve. Lila served it into the net, and we drove home in silence for the first 15 minutes. Then she started crying, said she’d let the whole team down. I almost said the generic parent line: “It’s just a game, don’t worry about it.” But I remembered what the coach said after our first meeting: when kids mess up, they don’t need you to minimize how they feel, they just need you to acknowledge it. So I said, “That really sucked. You practiced those serves every night after dinner for two weeks. It’s okay to be mad.” She cried for another five minutes, then asked if we could stop for McDonald’s fries. By the time we got home, she was texting her team about getting ice cream the next weekend. No big dramatic healing moment, just a bad loss that she worked through on her own.
It’s only been six months, so I don’t know how this goes. Lila might decide next season that she’d rather spend all her time drawing and quit, and that’s fine. I don’t have any dreams of her getting a volleyball scholarship, or even making the high school varsity team. What I do have is a kid who leaves her phone in the car during practice, who comes home sore and hungry and talking about silly inside jokes her team has, who helped the new 11-year-old on the team learn how to do overhand passes last week because she remembered what it felt like to be the new kid who couldn’t hit anything. It’s not perfect. We’ve had to rearrange dinner schedules, I’ve spent way too many Saturday afternoons sitting on hard bleachers, and I still can’t keep track of all the different tournament rotation rules. But for right now, it’s working. If you’ve got a kid who’s looking for something new, it’s worth asking around for that local entry-level team. You might be surprised what you find.
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