Introducing Your Kid to Club Volleyball: What I Wish I Knew Before We Started
The fluorescent lights in the suburban rec center hummed too loud at 8 a.m. last October, and I stood by the water fountain twisting my car keys around my finger while my 12-year-old Lila bent over to re-tie her neon pink volleyball shoes for the third time in 10 minutes. I’d spent the two weeks leading up to this tryout scrolling through parent forums panicking: Club volleyball is too expensive. It takes over your whole life. Kids burn out by 14. Lila had played rec volleyball through our city parks program for two years, and she’d begged me to let her try club after her coach mentioned it at the end-of-season picnic. I’d turned the idea down twice before, convinced we just didn’t have the time, money, or energy for another commitment. But she’d sat me down at the kitchen table after dinner, her elbows covered in spaghetti sauce, and said “I promise I won’t quit after a month. I just want to play more than once a week.” So I signed her up.
I leaned against the cinder block wall, sipping lukewarm coffee from a gas station cup, and tried not to stare. Lila wasn’t the tallest girl there, and she missed two overhand serves right into the net. But when a seventh grader next to her tripped over her own feet and dropped a pass, Lila jogged over and grabbed the ball before it rolled into the next court, then bumped fists with the girl to cheer her on. I’d seen preteens roll their eyes at teammates for far smaller mistakes, so that moment stuck with me.
After tryouts, the head coach pulled me aside. She didn’t lead with how well Lila played. She said “I noticed she doesn’t get frustrated when things go wrong. That’s the stuff we can’t teach. We’d love to have her on our developmental B team.” I breathed a sigh of relief I didn’t know I was holding.
Now, six months in, I can say all those panic-inducing forum posts were partially right, but mostly wrong. It does take extra time, but it’s not the all-consuming nightmare I thought it would be. The cost was the thing that scared me most— I’d seen posts about top travel clubs charging $5,000 a year or more, and that’s way out of our budget. But I didn’t know that most areas have smaller community-run clubs that offer developmental teams for a fraction of the price, and many have sliding scale payment options for families who need it. I worked up the courage to ask about that when I signed Lila, and they cut our fee by a third, no questions asked. That’s the first thing I tell every parent who asks me about club now: always ask about sliding scale, even if you don’t think you qualify. Most clubs care more about getting kids on the court who want to be there than hitting a specific price point.
The other big adjustment was the time. We have practice two nights a week from 6 to 8, and one tournament a month on the weekend. I work full time as an administrative assistant, and my husband’s job has him on the road three weeks out of four, so I thought I’d be spending every evening rushing through dinner and running late. But I connected with three other parents on the team who live within 10 minutes of my house, and we set up a rotating carpool. Each parent takes one practice a week, so I only have to do the drive twice a month, instead of twice a week. That’s the biggest concrete change I’d recommend any new parent make: don’t try to do it all yourself. Most other parents are in the same boat, and they’re just as happy to split the driving as you are.
What I didn’t expect was how much it would change Lila’s approach to the stuff that doesn’t involve volleyball. For the past couple of years, she’s struggled with test anxiety at school. If she got one problem wrong on a practice quiz, she’d crumple up her paper and refuse to keep going, convinced she was going to fail the whole test. I’ve sat with her through so many meltdowns after school, trying to talk her down, and nothing really stuck. Then, after her first tournament, we got in the car, and I asked her how it went. She’d missed three straight serves in the first set, and we lost that set by four points. I braced for her to get upset. She just shrugged and pulled a granola bar out of her duffel. “Yeah, that was bad,” she said. “But I adjusted my toss for the next set, got two in, and we won. It’s not that big of a deal.” I almost cried right there in the parking lot. She’d learned that one bad play doesn’t ruin the whole game, and that if you mess up, you just try again next time. That’s stuck with her at school, too. Last month, she got a C on a math test, and she just looked at the mistakes, wrote them down in her correction notebook, and moved on. That’s more than any pep talk I’ve ever given her did.
It’s not all perfect, of course. Some Saturday mornings, Lila hits snooze three times and says she doesn’t want to go to the tournament, and I have to bribe her with a breakfast burrito from her favorite spot down the road. Once, a dad from another team yelled so loud at the ref during a game that his own kid looked embarrassed, and that left a bad taste in my mouth. Sometimes practice runs 15 minutes late, and we get home at 8:45, and she has to rush through her homework before bed, which isn’t ideal. If she decides next year that she’d rather quit and focus on her pottery classes, I won’t be upset. I know a lot of parents get into club volleyball hoping for a college scholarship, but that’s never been our goal.
This weekend, we have a tournament an hour outside of town. I packed the cooler with Gatorade and fruit snacks last night, and Lila left her knee pads propped by the front door so she wouldn’t forget them. I don’t know what the future holds for her and volleyball. She might play in high school, or she might drop it in a year to chase something else. But I’m glad I stopped scrolling panic posts long enough to let her try. It’s given her more than just a new hobby, and it gave me a little less to worry about, too.
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