Introducing Your Kids to Club Volleyball: What No One Tells New Parents
I stood leaning against my minivan in the drafty parking lot of our local YMCA last March, watching my 12-year-old Mia cry into the backseat headrest. She’d played rec volleyball for two years, begged me to let her try a club team after her coach mentioned tryouts, and now she couldn’t make herself open the car door. All the other girls had walked in 10 minutes earlier, chattering in matching shorts, and Mia was convinced they all already knew each other and would think she was bad.
I dug through the center console for the Sour Patch Kids I’d stashed for soccer games, handed the bag back to her, and said what I’d rehearsed on the drive over: “We don’t have to make the team. We don’t even have to stay the whole two hours. You just have to go inside, do one full drill, and if you still hate it, we’ll leave and get mint chocolate chip before we pick up your brother from his scout meeting. No one has to know, no one will be mad.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve, pulled on her scuffed rec league hoodie, and walked in. I followed 10 minutes later to sit in the bleachers with the other waiting parents, and that’s when I started panicking a little. I’d gone into this completely blind, I realized. I’d heard club volleyball was expensive, time-consuming, only for kids who wanted to play college ball. I heard stories of parents driving 5 hours every weekend for tournaments, dropping thousands on private lessons and hotel stays. I’m a working mom with two kids, a mortgage, and a rule that no kid’s activity takes up more than two weeknights and one weekend day a month. I thought I’d messed up, that I’d gotten us into something we couldn’t handle.
Mia came out an hour and a half later, pink-cheeked, with a neon orange piece of tape on her wrist that a girl named Lila had put there to cover a scraped knee. She talked the whole drive home about how the coach let her try out the outside hitter position, how Lila saved her a spot on the water fountain line. She made the B-level local team a week later, and that’s when I learned the first thing no one tells you: most clubs have teams for every skill and commitment level. The elite teams that travel out of state are only a small fraction of what most clubs offer. Our team practices once a week, plays all tournaments within a 90-minute drive, and costs less than Mia’s monthly piano lessons used to. You don’t have to be a superstar or a millionaire to do this.
Over the past six months, I’ve picked up a handful of small, useful things I wish someone had told me before I signed the registration form. First, email the club director before you try out and tell them exactly what you can handle. If you can only do one practice a week, say that. If your kid is new and just wants to have fun, not compete for a college spot, say that. Most directors will point you straight to the right team, no pressure, and they’d rather have a kid who shows up consistently than a super talented kid who quits after two months because the commitment is too much. Second, don’t buy all the fancy gear before you make the team. I almost dropped $180 on a custom club backpack and professional kneepads before tryouts, and it turns out the team orders gear at cost after rosters are set, and most new players borrow kneepads from older siblings for the first season anyway. Third, if your kid is shy like mine, send the coach a one-sentence email before the first practice: “My kid is new and a little quiet, can you just point her to where to stand the first 10 minutes?” That’s all you need. Coaches deal with new kids every season, and that small heads-up takes all the pressure off your kid to figure it out alone.
The thing that surprised me most, though, is what it did for Mia’s confidence at school. She’s always been the kid that hunches down in her chair when the teacher asks for volunteers, that lets other kids make all the decisions for group projects. Last month, I watched their tournament game, and they were down one point with 30 seconds left. All the girls were talking over each other, and Mia stepped into the middle of the huddle, pointed at two girls and said “You take the back line, I’ll hit from the left. Let’s go.” I almost spilled my coffee on the bleachers. After the game, I asked her when she got comfortable doing that, and she shrugged and said “If you don’t call the play in volleyball, no one knows where to go. Someone has to do it.” It wasn’t something I taught her, it wasn’t something she learned in class. It just happened, because the team needed her to speak up.
It’s not all perfect, of course. Some Fridays she complains that she has practice instead of going to the movies with her friends. Last month she sprained her ankle sliding for a ball, and we missed my grandma’s 80th birthday dinner because she had to get an x-ray. We still forget her water bottle at least once a month, and end up paying $4 for a Gatorade from the tournament concession stand. I still don’t know all the rules, I can never remember what a libero does, and I’ve never paid for a private lesson.
Mia’s talking about trying out again next season, but she hasn’t fully made up her mind. Some days she says it’s too much running, some days she comes home talking about the new jump serve she finally nailed. I don’t push her one way or the other. If she quits, she’s already gotten more out of this than I ever expected. If she stays, I’ll be the one in the bleachers with extra socks and a bag of Sour Patch Kids, waiting to see what happens next.
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