Introducing Your Kid to Club Volleyball: What I Learned As a Parent Starting Out
I stood in the gravel parking lot of the community gym last January, shoving my hands into my too-thin coat, staring at the tryout reminder email on my phone for the tenth time. My 12-year-old Lila was already inside, changing into the hand-me-down spandex I’d picked up from a coworker’s daughter, and I was already questioning everything. Two months earlier, she’d quit rec soccer after complaining that half her team spent the whole game picking dandelions on the sidelines. Now she’d begged me to let her try club volleyball, something I’d always assumed was for hyper-competitive families with extra money and extra time, not ours.
I paid the $15 tryout fee and climbed up to the parent section, where half the other parents had fancy branded coolers and volleyball-themed sweatshirts. I listened to two women behind me talk about their annual spring tournament trip to Florida, how they’d already committed to 12 hours of practice a week for next season, and my stomach dropped. I’d only signed Lila up because she’d come home from school chattering about how her best friend got invited, how she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I’d had no idea we were walking into a whole other world.
I leaned forward to look for Lila on the court. She was one of the shortest kids there, and she tripped over her own feet within the first five minutes going for a low ball. But she popped right back up, and when the coach split them into scrimmages, she yelled “mine!” every single time, even when it was clearly someone else’s ball. By the end of the two-hour tryout, her hair was stuck to her neck with sweat, and she ran over to me before I even stood up, bouncing on her heels. “They passed to me three whole times,” she said. “Can I please do this if I make it?”
I went into this whole thing with a ton of wrong assumptions, I realized later. The biggest one was that all club volleyball is elite, all-consuming travel ball for future college players. That’s not true, at least not for new young players. Most local clubs have entry-level “development” teams that practice twice a week, only play tournaments within an hour of home, and cost a third of what the elite teams do. That’s the level Lila made, and that first month, I picked up a few small tricks that made the whole thing way less stressful than I expected.
For example, I used to bombard her with questions as soon as she got in the car after practice: “Did the coach say you were improving? Did you win your scrimmage? Are you starting in the next tournament?” I noticed she’d slump in her seat and give me one-word answers, so I switched it up. Now the first question I ask is always, “What was the silliest thing that happened today?” It takes the pressure off performance right away, and 9 times out of 10, she launches into a story about a girl on the team who accidentally hit the ball into the coach’s water bottle, or someone’s shoe broke mid-scrimmage. If she wants to talk about how she played, she’ll bring it up after that.
Another thing: I was worried about fitting all that driving into my work schedule. Before the season started, I asked the team manager to connect me with the other two parents on the team who live in our neighborhood, and we set up a rotating carpool. Two days a week, I take Lila and two other girls, and the other two parents take them the other two days. It cuts my driving time in half, and the girls get to hang out outside of practice, which has made the team feel more like a group of friends than just a bunch of kids playing a sport.
I’ve been surprised by how much it’s translated to school, too. Lila has always hated asking for help—she’d rather sit confused through a whole lesson than raise her hand and admit she doesn’t get something. On the volleyball court, if you don’t call for the ball, no one knows you’re open. If you don’t tell your teammate you messed up the pass, you can’t fix it next time. A month into the season, her math teacher emailed me saying Lila had started raising her hand to ask questions every day, something she’d never done before.
Of course, it’s not all perfect. Last month, she missed the game-winning spike in the final set of our first local tournament, and she cried the whole 20 minutes home. I used to jump in with “it’s just a game” and “you did great” when she got upset, but that never made her feel better. Now I just say, “That sucks. You worked so hard for that shot, and it’s okay to be mad about it.” Then I let her eat the entire bag of Sour Patch Kids I keep in the glove box for bad days, and by the time we get home, she’s usually already talking about what she’ll do differently next time.
I also learned early on that you don’t need to drop a ton of money on gear to start. We borrowed knee pads and a practice ball from our neighbor whose daughter had aged out of the team for the first two months, and we only bought new gear once we were sure Lila was going to stick with it. Even then, I bought most of it used from the club’s gear swap Facebook group for half the price of new.
This weekend, we have our first out-of-town tournament, two hours away, and I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to get my weekly work report done between matches. Lila just told me last week she wants to try out for setter next season, which means adding an extra hour of skill practice every week. Some weeks it feels like our entire dinner schedule revolves around getting to practice on time, and I still worry sometimes that we’re putting too much time into something that she might lose interest in next year. I don’t know if she’ll ever play college volleyball, or even stick with it through high school. Right now, though, it works. She comes home talking about her team, shows off her new bruises like badges, and has something that’s entirely hers—no homework, no expectations from me, just running around a gym with her friends. That’s more than I ever expected we’d get from a random tryout on a cold January morning.
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