What to Expect When You Introduce Your Kid to Club Volleyball: A Parent’s Real Guide
The gym at the local community center smelled like floor wax and old socks when I stood on the bleachers for my 12-year-old Lila’s first club volleyball tryout last year. She’d just quit rec soccer after a season of spending most games on the bench picking dandelions along the sideline, and had mentioned offhand that she thought volleyball looked fun after watching a game at her cousin’s high school. She was wearing her cousin’s hand-me-down kneepads that slipped down to her shins every time she bent over, and I had a lukewarm gas station coffee in one hand and a list of scary club volleyball rumors I’d heard from other parents in the back of my head: It’s too expensive. Coaches are brutal. Parents yell from the stands the whole time. It’s all about winning, not having fun. I kept waiting for her to look up at me and say she wanted to leave.
She didn’t. She lined up with 15 other 11- and 12-year-olds, fumbled her first pass so it hit the ceiling, and laughed when the coach joked that at least it was high. When she got hit in the forearm hard enough to leave a bruise an hour later, she just rubbed it on her shorts and stepped back in line. By the end of the two hours, she was bouncing on her toes and trading phone numbers with a girl with matching neon hair ties that she’d just met. I left thinking, okay, maybe this isn’t going to be the disaster I thought.
What I didn’t know going in is that most clubs don’t only have elite teams that travel across the country for national tournaments. Almost every local club has low-commitment developmental teams for kids who just want to learn the game and play regularly. That’s the first thing I tell other parents who are curious but nervous. Lila’s team practices twice a week for two hours, and only does local tournaments one weekend a month. Cost-wise, it’s less than I was paying for her weekly piano lessons that she never practiced. I made one big mistake early on: I went out and bought a $150 name-brand volleyball, brand-new kneepads, and custom team shoes before she even attended her first practice. She still uses the old ball we borrowed from my neighbor for warm-ups, and prefers her scuffed Converse to the new shoes. If you’re just starting out, borrow what you can for the first month, and only buy what you need once you know your kid will stick with it. That small step saves hundreds of dollars for no reason.
Before club volleyball, Lila would shut down completely any time she messed up something at school. If she got a B on a quiz instead of an A, she’d go to her room and say she was just bad at that subject and never wanted to try again. I’d sit outside her door trying to talk her down, and nothing I said worked. I started noticing a quiet change a couple months into volleyball. She’d miss a serve during a game, tap the net with her hand, and walk back to position without pouting. Once after a tournament where she missed the game-winning hit, she got in the car and said “That sucked” and then asked if we could get tacos on the way home. I didn’t have to give her a big speech about getting back up or anything. She just figured it out on her own, surrounded by kids who were all missing serves just like she was. That’s the part no one tells you about youth sports: the good lessons stick better when they aren’t being preached by a parent.
I’ve heard a lot of parents say they don’t want to put their kids in club sports because it’s too much pressure too young, and that’s a fair concern. I’ve been to the tournaments where you see parents yelling at refs and their kids from the bleachers, and it’s awful. But that’s not universal. When I was looking at clubs, I emailed three different local programs and asked two straight questions: what’s your policy on parent behavior, and how much play time does every kid get on a developmental team? The club we ended up with requires all parents to sign a code of conduct that says no yelling from the stands, and every kid plays at least half of every game in the developmental division. If a club can’t answer those two questions clearly, look somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be a high-pressure environment just because it’s called “club.”
It’s not all smooth, of course. Last month we had a tournament three hours away, I left work early, paid for a cheap hotel room, and Lila played 10 total points all day. The coach put her in for the last minute of the last two games, and that was it. Lila cried a little in the car on the way home, and I didn’t say “it’s just a game” or “you’ll get them next time” or any of that generic stuff. I just stopped at a Dairy Queen and got her a mint Oreo blizzard, and let her talk about how unfair it felt. A week later, she went back to practice, and the coach pulled her aside to work on her serving after practice, and she never mentioned it again. I don’t know if the coach was right or wrong, but it was a good reminder that bad days happen, and you don’t have to fix every bad thing immediately.
Lila still talks about quitting sometimes, usually on Tuesday nights when she has a big math test the next day and practice runs late. Sometimes I let her skip. We don’t have any big plans for her to play in college, or even high school varsity. It’s just something she does that gets her away from her phone for a couple hours a week, that gives her a group of friends that don’t go to her school, that lets her mess up and move on without me hovering to fix it. If your kid has mentioned wanting to try volleyball, you don’t have to drop thousands of dollars and rearrange your whole life to give it a shot. Start with a local developmental team, borrow gear, give it 30 days with an open out if they hate it. Some kids love it, some don’t, and that’s fine. Right now, it’s working for us, and that’s enough.
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