When the text came through from the volleyball club, I almost deleted it. It was a mass email reminding parents about the upcoming travel tournament, and buried in the second paragraph was a note about packing “a nutritious, non-perishable lunch for Saturday, including a water bottle and maybe a small snack for between games.” My daughter was eleven. The club team she’d just joined was already asking us to plan our weekend around a two-hour drive to a city I’d only driven through once.
I sat on the kitchen floor, surrounded by grocery bags, trying to remember if we even owned a cooler that wasn’t full of frozen chicken tenders.
We’d signed up for club volleyball three weeks earlier, mostly because my daughter, Chloe, came home from her sixth-grade intramural season saying she wasn’t getting enough “real” playing time. The school team was fine—twenty kids, two practices a week, and a rotation that meant everyone got a few minutes per game. But Chloe had caught the volleyball bug. She watched YouTube tutorials on hand setting. She practiced against the side of the house until the ball left scuff marks on the siding. When the flyer came home for the local club’s tryouts, she folded it into a tiny square and kept it in her pocket.
So we went. I’m still not entirely sure what I expected. Maybe a church gym with a few nets and some enthusiastic high schoolers. Instead, we walked into a facility with six courts, a pro shop, and a parent viewing area with its own coffee station. There were girls in matching warm-up suits doing dynamic stretches in a line. Chloe was wearing an old t-shirt and gym shorts. For a second, I saw her hesitate at the door, clutching the strap of her duffel bag.
Tryouts lasted ninety minutes. I watched through the glass as they ran through passing drills, hitting lines, and a scrimmage where the coach yelled things like “Hits over the net are a privilege, not a right!” and “Call the ball before you move to it!” Chloe came out sweaty, a little shaky, and absolutely glowing. She’d made it to the second round of cuts. The club director told us they’d email results within a week.
The email came. She made the roster for the 12U regional team—the second-highest team in her age group. We paid the club fee, bought a bag and kneepads, and signed a contract that said we understood practices were twice a week, mandatory, and that missing more than two practices could result in reduced playing time. That contract was my first real clue that this was not the rec league world I knew.
Here’s what surprised me most about that first season: the learning curve isn’t just about volleyball skills. It’s about learning to read a weather forecast for a town three hours away because a tournament might get rained out. It’s about learning that the “club” is actually a business, run by a board of parents, with a budget and a coaching staff and a set of unspoken norms around practice etiquette. It’s about learning that your kid is not just being taught volleyball—they’re being taught how to function in a highly structured, performance-oriented environment where communication has to be assertive and mistakes are okay as long as you immediately shake them off.
One practice stands out. Chloe’s coach, a former college player named Dana, had the girls do a drill where they had to run to a line and back between every three-pass sequence if anyone let a ball drop without calling it. Chloe called a ball too late and the girl next to her pulled back, thinking Chloe had it. The ball fell between them. Coach Dana blew the whistle, made them run the sprint, then gathered the whole team in a circle.
“What just happened?” she asked. No one answered.
“Someone’s communication was late. Somebody else hesitated. Whose fault is it?”
A girl mumbled, “Chloe’s, because she called it late.”
Chloe’s face went red. But Coach Dana shook her head. “It’s everyone’s fault. If you’re next to someone and you see them move late, you cover them. You don’t just stop. We trust each other, but we also have each other’s back. That’s a choice, and you make it every single rally.”
On the drive home, Chloe talked about that moment for twenty minutes—not about being blamed, but about the idea that trust is something you practice. That conversation stayed with me. Because as a parent, I’d spent so much time making sure she had good grades and kind friends and healthy food. I hadn’t thought about the volleyball court as a place where she’d learn to negotiate responsibility and backup plans in real time.
The practical side of club volleyball is what gets most parents, and it nearly got us. Practices are two hours twice a week, plus a tournament every three weeks from January to May. That means hotel bookings, gas money, and eating dinner at 8:30 on Tuesdays. It means driving home from a Saturday tournament at 9 p.m. with a tired kid who has a math worksheet due Monday. If you’re considering it, the best advice I can give is to be honest with yourself about your family’s capacity before you sign. Not just your bank account—which, yes, needs a real budget line for this—but your patience for the grind.
There are some things I wish someone had told me before we started. First, ask the club directly about their practice attendance policy before tryouts. Some clubs are flexible; some treat every practice like a playoff game. If you have another sport or a family commitment, make sure you know what you’re signing up for. Second, find out who the coach is on your child’s actual team, not just the club’s director. Ask other parents. A good player can be a terrible coach for young kids, and a patient coach matters more than a winning record.
Third, and this is the one I constantly have to remind myself about, is that club volleyball is not the same as school volleyball. The intensity is higher, the pace is faster, and the emotional stakes are bigger. Your kid might be a star at recess but a solid middle-tier player on club—and that’s okay. It’s actually good. It teaches them that there’s always someone better, and the goal is to improve rather than to be the best.
Chloe finished her first season not as the best setter on her team, but as the one who started shouting “Mine!” early enough for the person next to her to step off. Her grades slipped a little during tournament weekends, and we had to institute a no-homework-in-the-car rule because it made her carsick. She also started packing her own bag the night before practice, which—if you know anything about a formerly forgetful sixth-grader—is nothing short of a miracle.
We’re signed up for a second season now. Club volleyball hasn’t become easier; the practices are longer, the competition is tougher, and we’ve learned to plan our weekends around a laminated tournament schedule. But I’ve also stopped wondering if it was the right choice. When Chloe comes home exhausted, with Bruise-colored knees and a half-eaten granola bar in her pocket, she always says the same thing: “We need to work on our serve-receive. Coach said we’re close.”
That’s the thing about club volleyball. It doesn’t promise your kid will get a scholarship or become an all-star. It doesn’t even promise that they’ll love every minute of it. What it does is give them a place to practice showing up, to learn what trust really looks like in motion, and to discover that competition can be hard and still be worth it.
I’m still not sure we packed the right snacks that first tournament. But I do know that when I watch Chloe sprint to cover a ball that wasn’t hers, I’m watching her learn something I can’t teach her at the kitchen table. And that’s probably why we’ll keep driving to those tournaments. At least until she tells me to stop.
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