Introducing your kids to club volleyball: what parents should know before tryouts
The first time I picked up my daughter from club practice, I didn’t recognize her at first. She was standing under the gym lights, ponytail sideways, one knee pad bunched down around her ankle, and her face was the same shade of red as her practice jersey. “We ran a lot,” she said, and that was the entire car ride conversation until she fell asleep before we hit the main road.
We got here the way most families do, I think. She played rec league volleyball for two seasons. She liked it fine — the practices on Tuesday nights in the school gym, the snacks after games, the dads refing who missed half the calls. During the last rec tournament, a few parents from the other team mentioned their daughters were “on a club team.” That phrase felt like a secret language. I dug through the club’s website, sat through an information meeting in a folding chair, and signed her up for tryouts because she said she wanted to see if she could make it.
Tryout day was a blur. The gym was huge, packed with girls in matching warmups and the kind of loud that bounces off bleachers. Coaches with clipboards stood along the wall, saying nothing. I sat in the stands with the other parents, doing the thing where you pretend not to watch your kid every second. When she came out, she said, “I think it went okay,” in a voice that meant she wasn’t sure yet.
She made the team. And that’s when the actual education began.
Club volleyball is a different animal than rec. Practices are twice a week, ninety minutes each, and they run them with an intensity that surprised me. The coach doesn’t just teach the serve; he walks the line with each girl, adjusting her toss, her shoulder rotation, her weight transfer. There are stations, rotations, conditioning blocks. The girls run after missed serves — in games, and in practice, too. In rec, making a mistake usually meant a pat on the back. In club, it means a correction followed by another rep, and another.
The first thing we had to learn, honestly, was logistics. There’s a binder — a physical binder — with the season schedule, tournament dates, jersey sizes, and codes for the hotel block so families can book rooms together. It lives on the kitchen counter and has become part of our home’s landscape. The Saturday tournaments start at 7:30 a.m. on average, which on a Sunday would feel like a crime, but as a parent of a club athlete just becomes normal. We’ve learned which coolers keep the turkey sandwiches cold until the lunch break. We’ve learned that the phrase “we need to leave by 6:15” actually means “car’s leaving at 6:10 and we’re not waiting.”
In the middle of all that, I started noticing shifts in her that had nothing to do with her jump serve.
The biggest shift was in how she handled a bad call. In rec, when a line judge made a close call against her, she would glance around, confused, waiting for an adult to fix it. One afternoon at a tournament in Pennsylvania, a referee made a tight lift call on her. I saw her jaw set. She didn’t look into the stands for me. She walked back to the service line, tapped her left wrist — her signal to her setter — and took the next serve. She lost the point. She didn’t lose the set. Watching her adjust herself that fast, without looking for help, was more impressive to me than any great hit she’s made.
There are also things club volleyball teaches that we didn’t anticipate. She’s learned to read adults better because she deals with coaches who aren’t her parents and who don’t have to like her. She’s learned what it means to be one of fourteen girls, where the team’s success doesn’t rise and fall on how she plays individually. She’s learned to do homework in the minivan between pool play matches while other families ate soft pretzels in the food court. Some of this is great. Some of it is just the reality of the schedule.
But I should be clear, because club volleyball has a reputation for being a money pit and a time trap, and some of that reputation is earned. Club volleyball is expensive. Between the club fee, uniforms, tournament entry, travel costs, and the hotel rooms, we’re probably spending something in the low four figures this year. There are cheaper clubs and pricier ones. There are clubs that travel regionally and clubs that fly to Chicago for national qualifiers. The price tag alone doesn’t mean a better experience. We chose a smaller local club because the coach had a shorter commute and because the roster was full of girls from her school. The travel is manageable, which means we don’t hate our weekends.
It’s also worth asking the right questions before you sign anything. When we first met with the club director, I asked about how they handle missed practices, what the ratio of girls to coaches is, and whether teams are split by ability or mixed. Those answers told me more than the brochures. I asked how much tournaments actually cost beyond the registration fee. I asked about the family volunteer stuff. I asked if they had payment plans, because they do, and that changes how you think about the fee.
Some parents worry about burnout, and that’s a fair worry. We had a hard conversation at the halfway point last season when she came home quiet after a practice and said she “didn’t feel like going tomorrow.” I didn’t make her go. I let her skip, then we talked about what exactly was making her not want to be there. It turned out to be a teammate situation, not the sport or the workload. The next week she was fine. But I think the willingness to occasionally let a kid sit out is what keeps them in it for the long run.
A few things we’ve landed on that make it work: I try not to ask “how did you play?” on the way home from practice because that usually produces one-word answers. Instead I ask “how’s your teammate Sarah doing with the new set?” or “what drill did you hate the most?” — the second one gets actual responses. We keep Monday nights sacred with no volleyball talk. And we check in each season, not just every year. It’s a lot of activity for a kid’s schedule, and it deserves an honest review every few months.
This past tournament season, I sat in the bleachers with a cup of overly expensive cheese fries and watched her serve. She got three aces in a row. A parent across the aisle said, “She’s really become a reliable server.” That phrase stuck with me. Reliable. That’s what club volleyball has taught her, at least partially. She didn’t become a star. She didn’t become a starter on the first team. She became something closer to dependable, which in real life gets you further than raw talent.
I don’t know how many more seasons we’ll do. She’s in eighth grade now, and there will be fewer tournaments next year, not more, because she wants to try the spring musical. That seems okay. The binder on the counter will collect its share of scraps and reminders, and someday soon it’ll probably be replaced by something else that needs our car, our weekends, and our attention.
The practices still end with her flushed, ponytail sideways, one knee pad bunched around her ankle. The only difference is she doesn’t fall asleep before the main road anymore. She just sits in the passenger seat, quiet, and then tells me about the drill she hated most.
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