She said “Mom, I don’t think I want to play again.”
We were sitting in the car outside the gym, and just an hour earlier, she’d been grinning ear to ear after a solid win. Now, after a three-set loss in a Sunday afternoon tournament match—one where she’d missed two serves in a row and gotten subbed out—she was quiet, clearly upset, and telling me she wanted to quit.
Her club volleyball season wasn’t even three weeks old.
I won’t say I was surprised. We’d signed her up for a local club team back in November, mostly because she’d loved playing in the recreation league at our town’s community center. The rec league was laid-back: practice in the school gym, kids rotating positions, half the girls just there to hang out with their friends. She was one of the better players on her rec team, which meant she got to hit a lot, and when you’re twelve, hitting the ball is pretty much the whole point.
Club volleyball is a different world. The tryout itself was a wake-up call for both of us. Dozens of girls who’d clearly been playing for years, private coaches, arm sleeves with their names on them. I remember sitting in the bleachers trying to read a book while they ran drills, and I must have checked my phone fifty times in two hours.
She made the second team. Not the top team. The second team out of three at her age group. She was happy enough, but I noticed the first practice was quieter than rec league. There was a clipboard. There was a planned lineup. There were girls who knew the terms, who talked about rotations like they were speaking another language.
Now I’m not a volleyball person myself. I’m the mom who played softball growing up, and only because my dad coached the team. Volleyball was never on my radar. I knew what a dig was. I knew a serve had to go over the net.
But watching my kid struggle through that first month taught me more about youth sports—and about my own expectations—than the rec league ever did. I’m going to write this down in case another parent is standing in that same dark gym hallway, sniffing the rubber mat and trophy-case dust, while their kid is trying to figure out whether they’re in over their head.
The biggest adjustment isn’t physical. It’s the structure. Rec league gives you one practice a week and matches on Saturdays. You show up, play, go get pizza. Club asks for more before you even get going: a commitment form, a tryout fee, a season-long calendar with every tournament listed, one weekend each month from January to April. That calendar was enough to make me want to quit, and I wasn’t the one playing.
So I started by changing the environment at home instead of trying to stir up more enthusiasm.
We shifted our weekend schedule. Saturday was no longer random errands and then a game. The game was the center. We picked a bag of snacks for the car, and we made a rule: no watching my face during a missed point. I figured out that when I was sitting up too straight in my chair, or scrolling my phone in a bored way, she’d glance over and read it as either pressure or disinterest. I started sitting a couple rows back from the floor, wearing sunglasses sometimes, really just looking at the team’s bench instead of the court.
That may seem like a small thing, but it was the most useful practical change I made. The kids on her club team, the ones who seemed most settled, had parents who weren’t watching every single play like it was being videotaped for a scouting session. They were chatting with each other in the lobby. They’d wander in halfway through the third set of a tournament game.
The moment that shifted things for her wasn’t in the middle of a big highlight play, either. It was at a February practice when her coach—a woman in her fifties who still calls the girls “ladies” with a slight Southern accent—pulled the whole team aside after a scrimmage. She didn’t yell. She had them sit down and pass the ball in a circle, practicing what to say between points. Calling the score. Calling the serve. Giving each other a quick fist bump after a lost point.
Our girl came home that night and said, “Coach says the team that loses the point neatly wins more games.”
I think it was the first time she understood that volleyball, club volleyball specifically, isn’t just about hitting the ball down. It’s about what you do when you don’t. That’s a hard lesson for a twelve-year-old who’s used to being the strongest player on the court. She wasn’t the strongest player anymore, and that turned out to be okay. Not immediately—there were tears in the car after the Sunday match I mentioned at the start. But it was okay a week later, when she got assigned to serve in a bigger rotation role and didn’t fall apart.
Here’s what I would tell any parent considering the leap from rec to club, based on my beginner mistakes and a few things I got right.
Check the coach first. Not the club brochure. Sit through a practice. Watch how the coach addresses a girl when she makes a mistake. Is it “you need to watch the ball better” or is it “on the next one, try adjusting your feet earlier”? The second style is what you want. The difference is between critique and instruction. Instruction teaches the kid to take charge of improving. Critique just teaches the kid to feel bad about one bad swing.
Ask about the practice-to-tournament ratio before you pay anything. Some clubs are tournament-heavy, which sounds exciting but means a lot of sitting in folding chairs and watching other teams play. Other clubs spend most of the time in practice and do fewer, better-organized tournaments. For a first-year club kid, that latter model is often kinder. They get to improve quietly before being put on a stage every weekend.
Make peace with the position thing. In rec league, everyone gets to play everything. In club, kids get placed. Your daughter may be a setter, not a hitter. Your son may spend a season playing right side just because the team needs someone who can adjust. This is not a rejection. It’s more like being assigned a job in a group project. It teaches them how to be useful even when the spotlight isn’t on them. As a parent, you have to swallow your own pride about that. The kid usually adapts faster than you do.
The drive time is real. We chose our club because it was twenty minutes from the house, not forty-five, and I cannot overstate how important that is for a first year. Losing an extra hour on the road each way, hanging around before practice starts, will drain the whole family faster than the actual sport does. Don’t be impressed by a club that’s far away and prestigious. Be impressed by one that fits your weeknight rhythm.
I also learned to stay quiet in the car after matches. This is the hardest thing for me, still. I ask questions like “What was the coach thinking when …” or “Why didn’t you set her more?” and I don’t mean it as pressure, but it lands that way. I’ve been practicing a different approach. If she brings it up, I ask open things like “What did you notice about their serve?” If she doesn’t bring it up, we talk about dinner.
We’re halfway through the spring season now. She’s still not the top star on her team. She’s made friends with a few girls who also ride the bench now and then. She’s learned to pass when her arms are tired and to stay alert even when the ball isn’t coming to her side. She missed a serve again last Sunday and, honestly, she got over it in a couple minutes this time instead of a couple of days.
I don’t know if club volleyball will stick past this season. She still says sometimes that she wishes the practices were shorter, and I still wince when I look at the tournament fees. But I’m starting to think the most valuable thing she’s getting out of it isn’t volleyball at all. It’s learning to fail at something in a safe, repetitive, structured environment—and finding that the team is still there when you come out the other side.
So if your kid is asking about club volleyball, or wondering whether to try out, I’d say be cautious. Not about the sport, but about the demands. Go see a practice. Talk to other parents outside the building, the ones with a bit of tiredness in their eyes. They’ll give it to you straight.
The gym is cool, the ball is loud, and for one season at least, it can be exactly the kind of thing your kid needs—maybe not in the way you think, but in a way you’ll discover together, sitting somewhere in the bleachers while they figure it out one point at a time.
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