Introducing Kids to Club Volleyball: What I Learned Trying It For The First Time
Last August, I stood in the potholed parking lot of our city’s oldest recreation center, steam curling out of my lukewarm iced coffee, while my 12-year-old Lila picked at a scab on her kneecap and refused to move toward the gym door. She’d played one season of rec volleyball the year before, where half the girls spent practice picking dandelions on the sidelines, and now she was convinced every kid at this club tryout would have been playing since they were 8 and could spike a ball harder than I could throw one. I almost told her we could just leave and get ice cream instead. I’d heard all the horror stories about club sports: crazy expensive, parents screaming at referees from the bleachers, 10-hour weekends full of back-to-back tournaments that ruin your whole fall. I’d signed us up on a whim, after three weeks of Lila coming home from middle school, closing her bedroom door, and scrolling TikTok until dinner. Her small friend group had split apart at the start of 6th grade, and she hadn’t bothered to make new ones. I was out of ideas.
Then Lila sighed, slung her too-big duffel over her shoulder, and walked in before I could change my mind. I pressed my face to the crack in the gym door to watch, breathing in the familiar smell of old rubber, lemon disinfectant, and half-empty Gatorade bottles. The coach threw a ball to Lila on her first drill, and she overcorrected a pass, sending it flying into the bleachers where it hit a water bottle rack with a loud clatter. I tensed up, waiting for her to shrink away. Instead, a taller girl with pink hair who looked about 13 trotted over, picked up the ball, and showed Lila how to tuck her elbows in instead of flaring them out. Lila laughed, and they tried again. That’s when I knew we’d stay, even if it turned out to be as chaotic as I’d heard.
What no one tells you when you’re considering club volleyball for your kid is that there’s more than one kind of club. I’d pictured the elite travel teams that cost thousands of dollars a season and require you to skip family holidays for tournaments. But I found our entry-level team through the city’s recreation department, a developmental group for middle schoolers who are new to the sport. The whole season cost $280, that included uniforms and court time, and we only have practice two evenings a week, with one tournament a month, most within a 45-minute drive. That’s a big difference from the elite teams, and it’s perfect for kids who just want to play a sport and meet people, not get a college scholarship. I wish I’d known that years ago – I’d avoided club sports entirely because I assumed we couldn’t afford it or the time commitment.
After the first few practices, I figured out a few small things that made the whole experience easier. The first time, I hovered by the gym door the whole hour, and Lila kept glancing over, which just made her more nervous. The second practice, I went and sat in my car and read a novel for the whole two hours, and she didn’t even mention me leaving until it was over. If your kid is nervous on their first day, you don’t have to stay to support them – most of the time, you hovering just adds to their stress. Another thing I changed was what I ask on the drive home. At first, I’d jump right in with “Did you win? Did you score any points?” and Lila would go quiet. Our team loses most of our games, because most of the girls are new, and that made her feel like she’d done something wrong. Now I always ask “What’s the silliest thing that happened at practice or the tournament today?” She always has an answer: last week it was the coach tripping over a ball mid-drill, the week before that it was a girl whose hair extensions fell out mid-serve. It takes the pressure off, and gets her talking about the parts of the day that matter more than the score.
Last month, we hit our first big rough patch. The coach played Lila for less than a single set at our all-day tournament, because she wanted the older girls to get more playing time for a regional qualifier. Lila sat on the bench the whole day, chewing her thumbnail, and cried the whole 40 minutes home. I didn’t tell her “just work harder and you’ll play more” or “you can’t quit after one bad day.” I just said “That completely sucks. I’d be furious and hurt too. What do you want to do about it?” She thought about it for two days, then walked up to the coach after practice and told her she wanted more playing time. The coach said she’d get three sets in the next tournament, and that was that. Before club volleyball, Lila would have just quit and never said a word. She never would have spoken up for herself like that, not to an adult. That’s the thing no one talks about with these sports: it’s not about the volleyball. It’s about learning to be disappointed, and then figure out what to do next. It’s about having a group of people that aren’t your school friends, people you see twice a week who are all working on the same thing. Lila now texts her teammates on the weekends, goes to the mall with them, and when her school friends are being flaky, she has other people to hang out with.
We’ve had other small bumps: one of the parents made a snide comment about Lila missing a serve at our last tournament, I forgot to pack a snack for the all-day tournament once and we had to survive on vending machine Cheetos, Lila once left her brand new shoes at the gym and we didn’t find them for a week. It’s not the polished, perfect experience you see in social media posts about youth sports. It’s messy, it’s inconvenient, it sometimes ruins your weekend plans.
This weekend, we have a tournament two hours away, and I have to leave my sister’s birthday brunch an hour early to get there. Lila still forgets her knee pads at least once a month, which means we have to sprint to the nearest sporting goods store before warm-ups. Some weeks she says it’s the best thing she does all week, some weeks she complains about having to go right after school and says it’s stupid. I don’t push her one way or the other. It’s not leading anywhere big, at least not that I can see. But right now, it’s working.
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