Introducing Your Kid to Club Volleyball: What I Learned From My First Season As A Parent
The rubber soles of my sneakers stuck to melted slush on the gym parking lot when I dropped Lila off for her first club volleyball tryout last January. She’d insisted she didn’t need me to walk her in, but I pulled over anyway, watching her yank the neon secondhand duffel I’d bought off the back seat, her new knee pads peeking out the top. Two weeks earlier, she’d announced she was done with rec soccer—said the only thing she liked was kicking water bottles on the bench during timeouts. A friend from her science class had begged her to try club volleyball, so I’d signed her up, half hoping it would stick, half expecting another $50 registration fee down the drain.
I’d heard all the horror stories before that: parents dropping five grand a season for elite teams, coaches screaming at 12-year-olds for missing a serve, tournaments that take over entire weekends. I’m a single working mom, so that sounded like a nightmare for both my budget and my sanity. I only said yes because Lila wouldn’t stop talking about it, and I was tired of her coming home every day after school scrolling TikTok on the couch.
She came out of that first tryout an hour later, hair matted to her neck, a granola bar crumb stuck to her cheek, and said it was fine—better than soccer. The coach, a 10th grade math teacher from the local high school named Mrs. Henderson with two kids of her own, pulled me aside a week later to say Lila had made the 12U B team. She handed me a printed one-page info sheet that lead with “Rule 1: If you forget your knee pads, borrow from the bin, don’t text your mom to bring them.” I knew right then this wasn’t the hyper-competitive nightmare I’d pictured.
I started noticing small shifts in Lila after a month that I didn’t expect. She’s always shut down when she messes up anything—if she burned toast, she’d throw the whole loaf away and say she could never cook again. If she got a question wrong in front of the class, she wouldn’t raise her hand for the rest of the week. But one night she came home from a school debate competition and said she’d messed up her entire opening line, but just took a breath and kept going. I asked her how she didn’t panic, and she shrugged and said, “It’s like missing a serve. You just walk back to your position and wait for the next one.” That’s when I realized the stuff she was learning on the court was bleeding into the rest of her life, in a way I never planned.
Over the season, I picked up a few small, practical things that make the whole experience way less stressful for new parents. First off, don’t buy all new gear before your kid knows they even like the sport. Almost every youth club has a bin of used knee pads, shoes, and extra volleyballs donated by older kids. I borrowed knee pads for the first month, bought Lila a $20 duffel off Facebook Marketplace, and only splurged on a brand new volleyball of her own after she’d been playing for three months and said she wanted to practice at home. That saved me almost $150 right off the bat.
Second, car pool as much as possible. Three of the girls on the team live in our neighborhood, so we each take one weekend a month driving to out-of-town tournaments. That means I only miss half a day of work once a month instead of every other weekend, and we split gas and parking costs. It cuts the hassle way down, and the kids love chatting in the back seat on the drive over.
Third, remember optional practices are actually optional. I used to feel guilty that Lila skips the Sunday open gym most weeks to go to her grandma’s for dinner or hang out with her best friend. When I mentioned it to Mrs. Henderson, she said she’d rather have a kid who shows up to mandatory practice rested and happy than a kid who drags themselves to extra practice resentful. That stuck with me. So many people act like club sports have to take over your entire life, but for kids 14 and under, it’s okay to let it fit around your existing plans, not the other way around.
And fourth, you don’t have to buy into the parent hype. A lot of parents stand right by the court yelling every play, and compare stats after every match. I bring a paperback and sit in my car between matches, or walk around the nearby park. No one bothers me, and Lila doesn’t care if I’m watching every second of warm-ups. It works for me, and it keeps me from getting stressed out over every missed serve.
It’s not all perfect. It’s still more expensive than rec league, and we budget for it by cutting back on our monthly takeout nights. Some tournaments are four hours long and we don’t get home until 9pm on a Saturday, and Lila has to do her homework in the car. She didn’t make the A team for the end-of-season tournament, and she cried for 20 minutes when she found out, then got ice cream with her teammate and got over it.
Last week, we sat on the couch after dinner looking at next year’s schedule. She said she wants to sign up again, but she’s also auditioning for the school play in the fall, and if she gets the lead, she’ll probably quit volleyball for the year. That’s fine with me. I went into this thinking I was signing her up for a sport, to get her more exercise or teach her some big life lesson. What I got instead is a 12-year-old who knows what it feels like to mess up and keep going, who has a group of friends outside of her school class, who gets to leave homework at the door and run around for two hours every Tuesday. It won’t last forever if she doesn’t want it to, and it’s not leading to a college scholarship or any big prize. But right now, it’s exactly what we both needed.
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