Introducing Your Kid to Club Volleyball: What I Learned As A Parent
The spaghetti sauce was boiling over when Lila dropped her neon kneepads on the kitchen counter last April. She’d just finished her last rec league volleyball game, and her coach had pulled me aside before we left, saying she had good hand-eye coordination and seemed hungry for more. “I don’t want to play with the girls who spend the whole practice texting on the sideline,” she said, kicking a granola bar crumb across the tile. “I want to try club.”
I’d already sat through enough soccer car rides with other parents to know the reputation of club volleyball. It’s all $3,000 annual fees, out-of-state tournaments every other weekend, dads getting ejected from games for yelling at refs, and kids burning out by 8th grade, or so the stories go. My husband travels half the week for work, I work 25 hours a week at the local elementary school front desk, and we already had my son’s soccer games every Saturday. I almost said no right there. But this was the first thing Lila had begged to try in more than a year, after quitting rec soccer because she was bored. I decided to look into options, not just shut it down.
I started by scrolling through local parent groups, and that’s where I heard about the small developmental program run out of the community center, not the fancy national travel club everyone on the PTA talks about. Their 12U team practiced twice a week for an hour and a half, only did five tournaments a season all within 45 minutes of our house, and the entire season cost $600 including uniforms. It wasn’t what I expected from club volleyball at all. I signed Lila up for tryouts, figuring she’d hate the pressure and we’d be done after a weekend.
Tryouts were two weeks later. Lila tripped over her own feet during the first 3-man drill, and I watched her face go bright red from the bleachers, where I was sipping bad gas station coffee. I thought that was it, she’d want to leave early and get ice cream to forget the whole thing. But she brushed herself off and kept going, and by the end of the two hours she was laughing with another girl while they picked up stray balls. She made the developmental team, not the competitive travel squad, which was exactly what we wanted.
I started noticing small changes after about a month. Lila used to leave all her homework for the last minute every night, and we’d argue for 20 minutes before she’d pull out her binder. But after starting club, she hung a cheap whiteboard on her closet door and started blocking out 45 minutes before practice to get the bulk of her work done. If she didn’t, she’d have to finish after practice at 8:30, which cuts into her 20 minutes of TikTok before bed, so she fixed the habit on her own. I didn’t nag her once, which still feels like a win.
At their first tournament, Lila missed three straight serves in the opening set. I saw her shoulders hunch, and I braced for her to walk off the court crying. Her coach called a timeout, walked over, and just pointed to her feet. “You’re standing too wide,” she said, handed Lila a fresh bottle of water, and that was it. No yelling, no public criticism. Next set, Lila served two aces in a row, and the whole bench screamed. They ended up taking third, and on the drive home Lila didn’t even mention the placing – she just talked about how one of the other moms brought homemade chocolate chip cookies and how the girl opposite her had the same neon Hydro Flask as her.
A lot of parents I talk to assume club volleyball has to be this huge, all-consuming commitment, but that’s not true. The biggest mistake I see people make is jumping straight to the top-tier competitive clubs that everyone brags about, before checking out smaller local programs that focus on skill building for kids who just like the game. If you’re thinking about letting your kid try, start by searching for “developmental club volleyball [your area] [age group]” and skip the first few results that lead with national championship banners. Second, ask the coach two specific questions before you sign: How much playing time does each kid get in tournaments, and will my kid be penalized for missing practice for school or family events? A good program for young kids will tell you every kid plays at least half of every set, and they won’t guilt you for prioritizing other things. Third, always look for a trial option. Our program let us do one month of practices for $75, so if Lila hated it we wouldn’t be out hundreds of dollars. And don’t sleep on carpool – four of us parents split driving twice a week, so I only have to do one run a week, which cuts the time burden way down.
It’s not all perfect, of course. Last month Lila procrastinated on her big science fair project, so she had to miss practice to finish it. The coach didn’t send a dozen worried texts or threaten to take away her playing time, just said “No problem, catch up on Thursday.” Two weeks ago, she came home grumpy because she didn’t get to play the position she wanted in the last tournament, and said she wanted to quit. I told her she could sit out one practice, think it over, and we’d talk later. She went back the next week, and the coach moved her to outside hitter like she asked.
Right now, she’s trying to decide if she wants to do the summer club session or go to art camp with her best friend from elementary school. I’m not pushing her one way or the other. I used to think introducing your kid to club volleyball was about getting them a college scholarship or turning them into a star athlete. Turns out, for us, it was just about letting her try something that she wanted, that pushed her a little without taking over our whole family’s life. It doesn’t have to be forever, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s just something she’s trying right now, and that’s enough.
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