Introducing Kids to Club Volleyball: What I Wish I Knew Before My Daughter’s First Season
The parking lot of the suburban rec center smelled like hot asphalt and cherry Slurpee last August, when my 12-year-old Lila twisted a pair of neon pink knee pads around her wrist and told me she couldn’t go in to club volleyball tryouts. “Everyone here’s been playing for forever,” she said, staring at her scuffed sneakers. “I’ll be the worst one.”
I’d spent months overthinking this anyway. My older son did travel soccer when he was her age, and it ate our weekends, cost a small fortune, and ended with him quitting mid-season because he hated how stressed our whole family got. I’d assumed all club sports were the same: all recruiting, all yelling from the sidelines, all missed birthday parties for out-of-state tournaments. But Lila had finished her first year of rec volleyball, and every week she’d come home complaining that half the team didn’t show up to practice, and she never got to practice hitting because the coach spent all his time corralling the kids who were texting on the bench. She wanted more, so I’d started digging.
I told her, “We’ll go in for 10 minutes. If you hate it, we’ll get another Slurpee and go home and watch that new Avatar show you like. No lectures, no guilt.” She sighed, grabbed her bag, and followed me in. The gym was loud, shoes squeaking, whistles blowing, all the other kids already knew each other. I sat in the back bleachers with the other parents, paid $3 for a lukewarm coffee from the vending machine, and watched. Lila hung back for the first five minutes, but when the coach split them into small scrimmages, she got a soft set right where she likes it, swung, and put it right on the back line past the other team’s blockers. She didn’t jump up and cheer or anything, just gave a tiny half-smile to the girl who set her, and that’s when I knew she wasn’t going to want to leave.
A year later, the biggest thing I can tell other parents considering this is that club volleyball doesn’t have to be the elite, all-consuming nightmare you’re probably picturing. Most people hear “club volleyball” and think of 14-year-olds training four hours a day with parents dropping thousands on private lessons and cross-country travel. But almost every local club has developmental teams for new players that only practice once a week, and only do two or three local tournaments a season, all within an hour’s drive. Our whole first season cost less than my son’s one season of soccer travel, including all gear.
If you’re thinking of introducing your kid, there are a few small, concrete things that made this way easier for us. First, start with an open gym, not a tryout. Almost every club hosts free or $5 drop-in open gyms a month before tryouts for new kids, so they can get used to the pace without the pressure of making the team. We went to two of those, and by the time tryouts rolled around, Lila already knew where the water fountain was, and what the coach’s whistle sounded like, which cut her anxiety in half. Second, don’t buy all new gear right away. Most clubs give you the team jersey and bag, so you just need knee pads and court shoes. I got a barely used pair of name-brand court shoes from another parent on the club’s Facebook page for $20, instead of paying $100 for new ones that she’ll outgrow in six months. Third, don’t do all or nothing when they get overwhelmed. At our first all-day tournament, Lila came off the court after two games, red-faced, and said she wanted to leave. The noise was too much, she’d missed four easy passes, and she didn’t want to play anymore. Instead of telling her she had to tough it out or letting her just leave, I suggested we sit in the car for 20 minutes, eat a granola bar, and turn on her podcast. If she still wanted to leave after that, we would. Half an hour later, she asked if we could go back in for the last match. That worked way better than any pep talk I could have given.
What I didn’t expect was the quiet shift I’d see in Lila off the court. She’s always been the kind of kid who’d rather not try something new than mess up in front of people. If she got a problem wrong in math class, she’d crumple up her paper and refuse to try again. On her developmental team, the coach makes them talk after every bad play, not just brush it off. If you miss a pass, you have to tell your team what you need next, instead of slumping off to the back line. Last month, after she missed three passes in a row in a tournament, she walked over to her setter and said, “I need you to call the pass louder so I can hear you over the crowd.” That’s something she never would have done a year ago. She would have just quit trying for the rest of the game.
This week, she came home from practice and said she wants to quit piano to make time for an optional extra skills clinic once a week. Piano’s been her thing for three years, and I’m not thrilled about it, honestly. I don’t know if this will last. Next year she might decide she hates the early weekend practices, or get tired of losing, and want to quit. I don’t know if it’ll turn into the stressful, all-consuming thing I was worried about when we walked into that tryout. But right now, she comes home every Tuesday with grass stains on her socks from the post-practice snack run, a new silly nickname from her teammates, and a story about whatever mess-up happened in practice that they all laughed about. That’s more than I ever expected from a sport I was scared to sign her up for. We’ll see how it goes.
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