My daughter joined club volleyball last fall. I remember the first practice clearly—the gym smelled like rubber and floor wax, and she sat in the back seat of the car with her kneepads still in the package, flipping them over and over like they were some kind of artifact.
She’d played on the school team for two years, but this was different. The girls were taller, louder, and moved with a kind of purpose that felt a little intimidating. My daughter is not the tallest or the fastest. She’s the one who hangs back, who needs to watch for a few minutes before she jumps in. So when the coach blew the whistle and told everyone to get into pairs for a passing drill, I saw her hesitate.
She found a partner, barely, and within thirty seconds she’d shanked a ball into the bleachers. She looked over at me, half embarrassed, half checking to see if I was going to react. I gave her a small nod and looked down at my phone, which is the parent equivalent of saying I’m not going to make this weird.
That first month was hard. Not for me—I just sat in the stands and tried not to pace. But for her. Club volleyball is not like rec league or the school team. The pace is faster. The expectations are higher. The players have been doing this since they were eight, some of them. They’ve had private lessons. They know what “six-pack” means in the volleyball sense, not the grocery store sense.
I remember watching her shoulders slump after a particularly rough scrimmage. She came off the court and sat next to me, pulling at the tape on her fingers. “I don’t even know where I’m supposed to be,” she said. And that was true. She kept drifting to the back row when she should have been at the net, crossing over teammates, hesitating on serves.
It would have been easy to pull her out. A few parents did. But the coach, a older woman named Denise who coached college ball before kids, said something that stuck with me. She told the team, “Making mistakes is how you learn where the lines are. If you never miss, you never knew where the line was in the first place.”
That reframed it for me, and I think for my daughter too. After a few weeks, she started talking in the car about what went wrong—not in a self-defeating way, but almost analytically. “I see it now. I need to split the court with my right-side blocker. I was standing too close to the net.” She said it the way you’d talk about a math problem you finally got.
That’s the thing about club volleyball that surprised me most. It’s not just about athletic skill. It’s about a certain kind of mental work—learning to read the play, to adjust in seconds, to take responsibility for your own mistakes without spiraling. The coaches don’t have time to hold your hand. There are twelve girls and one whistle. So players learn to self-correct.
I’m not saying this happens overnight. There were plenty of nights where my daughter came home frustrated, ate dinner in silence, and went to bed early. One tournament in particular—a two-day thing in another state—she played maybe six minutes total. She sat on the bench the rest of the time, staring at the floor. On the drive home, she didn’t say much. I wanted to fix it, but I knew that was my own discomfort. So I just drove.
The next day, she asked if we could go to the gym and pass the ball back and forth. That was her way of processing. She wasn’t quitting. She was figuring out what she needed to work on. That, honestly, was worth more than any win.
If you’re thinking about getting your kid into club volleyball, here are a few things I wish someone had told me, without the rose-colored glasses.
First, don’t pick the most competitive club just because it’s the most competitive. Go watch a practice first. Watch how the coaches talk to the kids. Do they yell, or do they instruct? Is there a lot of standing around, or are players always moving? My daughter’s current club is not the top-ranked one in the region, but the coach knows every kid’s name and actually rotates positions based on what she sees in practice, not just who’s tallest.
Second, be realistic about the time commitment. Club season runs from November through April, sometimes into May for national qualifiers. That means weekend tournaments, overnight travel, and a lot of early mornings. It also means your family calendar will suddenly revolve around volleyball. If you have other kids, that’s a real consideration. We’ve had to split up on weekends—my wife takes our son to his soccer games, and I’m at the tournament with our daughter. It’s not ideal, but it’s manageable if you plan ahead.
Third, talk to your kid about what they want out of it. Some kids want to play college ball. Some just want to get better in a more serious environment. Both are valid, but the club you choose should match the goal. If your kid just wants to play once a week and hang out with friends, club might be overkill. If they’re the kind of kid who rebounds from losing a point and immediately asks for the ball again, club might be the right fit.
One more thing—be careful about your own energy. It’s easy to become a “volleyball parent” without realizing it. You start tracking playing time. You start reading into lineup decisions. I’ve caught myself doing it, and it doesn’t help. What helps is the car ride home. That’s where the real processing happens. So I’ve tried to just listen. “How did you feel out there today?” And then I shut up. Let her talk.
We’re halfway through the season now. My daughter still isn’t the star. She comes off the bench more than she starts. But something shifted a few weeks ago. She’s gotten more confident calling for the ball. She’s talking to her teammates between points, not just retreating into herself. The other day, she made a dig that she absolutely had no business making—it hit her forearm at an angle and somehow floated straight up to the setter. The whole bench went wild. She ran back to her spot, trying not to smile, and I saw her check the coach’s face. Denise gave her a quick thumbs-up.
At the end of the day, I don’t know if club volleyball will lead to college recruitment or even another season after this. My daughter might decide she wants to do something else next year. I’ve learned not to look too far ahead. For now, she’s getting something out of it—the chance to fail in front of other people and see that she survives, that she can adjust, that a missed serve isn’t the end of the world.
That feels like a pretty good lesson, even if it comes with a lot of early mornings and a back seat that smells like sweaty kneepads. We’re still figuring out the balance. I suppose we always will be.
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