Club Volleyball for Kids: What Parents Should Know Before the First Tryout
The drive home from the tryout took twenty minutes, and Maya said maybe four words. Her kneepads were still on, half-rolled down her shins, and a water bottle rolled around the floor of the car every time I turned. Somewhere near the grocery store on Route 9, she said, “There were like eighty girls in there.”
She was eleven. She’d played two seasons of rec volleyball at the Y, the kind where everyone rotates and the scoreboard gets reset if it gets too lopsided. This was different. This was a gym with six nets and evaluators in folding chairs, each holding a clipboard, each writing things down.
I hadn’t planned on club volleyball. A mom at pickup mentioned it in passing—tryouts are next month, you should look into it—and I did what I usually do, which is open a browser tab and forget about it for two weeks. Then Maya asked if she could try out. She’d heard from a friend that the girls got matching warm-up jackets.
So we paid the forty-dollar tryout fee, drove to a sports complex off the highway, and stood in a line that snaked past the concession stand. Most of the girls had come in groups. Maya knew one of them.
The tryout itself was ninety minutes. I watched from the mezzanine with the other parents, all of us pretending to read our phones. The drills were simple—passing lines, serving, a scrimmage at the end. What struck me wasn’t the skill level. It was how many girls looked unsure of where to stand. Including mine.
Two days later, the email arrived. She’d made the second team. Not the first, not the third. The club had four teams at her age group, which I hadn’t known was a thing.
Here’s what nobody tells you: the decision takes about ten minutes, but the consequences run for seven months.
The season ran November through May. Two practices a week, ninety minutes each, plus one weekend tournament a month, some of them two hours away. The cost was $1,850, not counting the uniform, the shoes, the travel, or the twelve-dollar adult admission at every tournament. We carpooled with two other families and still spent most Saturdays in a convention center eating pretzels.
I’m not writing this to scare anyone off. I’m writing it because I went in blind and would have appreciated a parent telling me what the first month actually looked like.
For Maya, the hard part wasn’t the time commitment. It was the bench. She was one of the youngest on her team, and she was, honestly, not as strong as the girls who’d been playing club since they were eight. In her first tournament, she played maybe four rotations across three matches. She came home quiet again, and this time it wasn’t the tired kind of quiet.
I made a mistake that first week. I asked, “Did you win?” She said no. I asked if she’d played well. She said she didn’t know. Then I said something like, “Well, as long as you’re having fun,” which is what you say when you don’t know what else to say.
What actually helped came later, from her coach. He pulled the team together after a loss and said, “Nobody on this bench is being punished. I’m putting in the people who give us the best chance to win the set. Your job is to be ready when I call you, and to make the starters work in practice.”
That reframed it for her. Not perfectly, not overnight, but enough. She started staying after practice to serve. She started keeping a little notebook—her idea, not mine—with things she wanted to get better at. Most of it was illegible.
What I’d tell another parent, if they asked:
Go watch a regular practice before you sign anything. Not a tryout—a midweek practice, when nobody’s performing for guests. Watch how the coach talks to the girls who are struggling. That tells you more than any win-loss record.
Ask about playing time in plain language. Not “will my daughter play?” but “how do you decide who plays in the third set?” If the answer is vague, that’s an answer.
Ask how many teams are in your age group. If there are four, your kid might be on the fourth. That’s fine, but you should know it before you write the check.
Look at the tournament schedule. If it’s six weekends across four states, decide now whether that’s realistic, not in January when you’re already committed.
Keep the first season small. We didn’t buy the expensive shoes until March. We borrowed a bag. We said no to the optional summer clinic. If she quits in February, we’re out a season fee, not a small fortune.
The thing I’ve come to believe about club volleyball—and this probably applies to club anything—is that the sport is only half of it. The other half is learning how to be on a team where you’re not the star, how to sit on a bench without sulking, how to ask a coach a question without falling apart. Those aren’t skills I can teach at the dinner table.
Maya’s season ended in May. She’s playing again in the fall, same team, which surprised me. She still isn’t the strongest player. She still sits sometimes. But she’s the one now who yells the loudest from the bench, and her serve has gotten good enough that she’s not nervous about it anymore.
I don’t know if she’ll keep playing past middle school. I don’t know if the cost is worth it in any measurable way. But last Saturday she asked me to take her to the park to practice, and she served for an hour while I shagged balls. That’s where we are.
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