Introducing Your Kids to Club Volleyball: What to Expect When They Try Out
The gym smelled like rubber and floor wax, and I was sitting three rows up in the bleachers, holding a coffee I hadn’t touched. Below me, forty or fifty kids were doing a passing drill in long lines, all wearing the same sort of loose shorts and tied-back hair. My eleven-year-old, Maya, was somewhere in the middle of the rotation. She popped a pass up high and then shanked the next one into the net. She looked over at the coach, then at the floor, and got back in line.
I hadn’t expected to be here. Ten months earlier, I didn’t even know club volleyball was a thing.
Maya played rec volleyball last spring through the local community center. One practice a week, Saturday morning games at the middle school gym, parent volunteer coaches. She liked it more than soccer, which she’d played since first grade. She said volleyball made sense to her — you stand in a specific spot, you do a specific thing, and you can see exactly how it goes.
So when one of the soccer moms mentioned a club tryout during a carpool drive — casually, like it was common knowledge — I nodded along and then went home and started googling.
The tryout was more official than I expected. We registered online, signed a waiver, paid forty dollars. It was at a sports complex past the highway, and when we walked in, we got a sheet with the schedule: a few drills, a scrimmage, then a short parents’ meeting with the director.
I stood against the wall with the other adults, most of them holding younger siblings or refilling water bottles. Maya waved at us from across the court, then went in for a pass. I felt a knot in my stomach that was her nerves, maybe, or mine.
The club director explained that the club had three teams for the age group — an A, B, and C team — and that “all kids are placed somewhere if we see a willingness to learn.” The phrase stuck with me.
At the kitchen table that night, Maya was quiet. She told us she’d messed up “a lot of serves” and that the coaches “mostly watched and wrote notes.” My husband asked if she had fun, and she shrugged. We told her the lists would come out by email on Monday, and that whatever happened, we were proud of her for trying something new.
That conversation was harder than I thought it would be. I realized I wanted her to want to do volleyball again because it was something to be good at — and I could hear my own pressure in that.
The email came Monday. Maya made the B team. I called a mom I knew from rec, who had a daughter on the same team, and we started figuring out carpools. That’s when the practical reality set in.
Club volleyball is not cheap. The season fee was about $1,500 for practices twice a week from November through April, plus two tournaments a month and a uniform kit. We budgeted by cutting back on weekend takeout and using birthday money for the new knee pads. It’s a privilege to be able to do it at all, and I know plenty of families for whom this would be a non-starter.
What surprised me most wasn’t the cost, though. It was how different the coaching felt from the rec league.
The first practice, I sat in the lobby reading a book while Maya warmed up. When I peeked through the glass, the coach was running a drill where players had to say the other player’s name before every pass. It was about focus, communication, both. When a girl made an error, the coach didn’t dwell on it. She just moved on. Nobody was yelled at.
Over the next few weeks, I noticed changes in Maya. She’d come home from practice tired, but she’d talk about specific things — “I couldn’t rotate right at first” — and she’d want to practice her approach step against the side of the garage. She also started noticing the other girls on the team. “Some of them are really good,” she said once in the car. “Some are just like me.”
The developmental payoff here is real, but it isn’t the volleyball. It’s watching your kid get corrected by a coach who isn’t you and deciding whether to keep trying. It’s learning to read instructions mid-drill while you’re tired. It’s figuring out that you matter less in the moment than the position you need to fill.
As a parent, there were a few things I wish I’d known earlier. It’s worth asking the club director specific questions before you register: How do coaches give feedback — publicly or privately? What’s the policy on bench time for kids who need more practice? What would make them cut a player, if anything? Those answers tell you more than the website’s marketing pages.
It also helps to watch a practice before you commit. Most clubs will let you sit in the lobby or at the edge of the bleachers. Pay attention to how the coaches talk to the kids when a play goes badly. This is still a kids’ sport, and some coaches operate with a loud style that suits certain kids but crushes others. You know your kid.
And think about how you’ll talk about tryouts and games. The most useful phrase I found was asking, “What did you like about that?” and then shutting up. When Maya said “I was terrible” after one bad scrimmage, I wanted to comfort her, but what worked better was pointing at a specific moment: “Remember that pass you returned from the corner in the second rotation? You turned your body so it went straight up. That’s improving.”
That might not sound like much, but it’s the language of noticing, not judging. It says someone saw the effort, not just the score.
It’s also completely okay to say no to club volleyball. We nearly did. The schedule sounded exhausting, and there were times in November when I wondered if we’d made a mistake dragging Maya to practice in the dark and cold three times a week. But she kept saying she wanted to go, so we went.
Her first tournament is in a few weeks. I don’t know how it will land. She might sit most of a match. She might get one serve in and be over the moon. She might decide she hates club and quit by spring, and that will be fine too — the season is an experiment, not a lifetime sentence. We’ll figure it out the way we’ve figured out the rest: one carpool, one practice, one email from the coach at a time.
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