Why Club Volleyball Was Actually Good for My Kid (and What I Wish I Knew First)
The gym smelled like rubber, sweat, and floor polish. My daughter, eleven, stood in a shaky line of girls all wearing the same neon practice jersey, trying to look like she belonged. She caught the ball off a forearm pass and fumbled it, and I watched her glance sideways at the coach before resetting into stance. This was her first club volleyball practice, and I sat in the bleachers wondering if we had made a huge mistake.
She hadn’t always seemed like a club kid. For two years she played recreational volleyball in the local league—one practice a week, games on Saturday afternoons, and nobody really kept score. She loved it, but by the end of the second season she was asking for more. More practices. More games. More actual volleyball instead of the chaos of sixth-graders chasing serves.
I ignored it at first. Club volleyball felt like a different species—the travel, the fees, the parents who brought coolers full of snacks and a spreadsheet of college recruiting timelines. That wasn’t us. But she kept asking, and finally I talked to a mom whose daughter had played club for a year. Her advice was simple: “Just go to a tryout. If she makes a team, you’ll know.”
We went. The tryout was in an enormous sports complex with four courts going at once. My daughter looked small in the crowd of girls doing hitting lines in front of college-age coaches with clipboards. She passed, she hit, she missed, she waited. For two hours I watched her from the lobby through a glass window, not sure if she was enjoying herself or just surviving. When she came out, she said, “That was really fun.” She made the team.
Then came the hard part: saying yes. The fees were more than a week of camp. The season ran from January to May, with two practices a week and four tournaments on weekends, some an hour and a half away. We had a family calendar that was already full. But I watched her glowing in the parking lot, and I decided to let her try it for one season—with the understanding that we would all reassess in May.
What I didn’t expect was how much of my own parenting assumptions would get challenged.
The first tournament, she played in about a third of the points. She spent most of the day on the bench cheering for teammates. I sat in the bleachers feeling that familiar parental knot tighten in my chest. I wanted to talk to the coach. I wanted to ask why my kid wasn’t in the game. But I didn’t. I watched her instead. She was clapping, leaning over the sideline during timeouts, and high-fiving girls after every point. She wasn’t upset. She was part of something.
That was the first lesson: club volleyball is not about playing time. It’s about the work that happens before the game—the drills, the repetitions, the coach who notices that your footwork is wrong and makes you do it again until it’s less wrong. In rec league, every kid gets a turn and a trophy. In club, the coach is building a team, and that sometimes means a less skilled player sits while a stronger one plays. That’s not cruel. It’s just different. And for my daughter, it was actually motivating. She said, “I’m going to get better so I can play more.” That’s the first time I’d ever heard her talk about her own improvement as a goal.
But there were hard weeks too. The Saturday morning drives when she was grumpy. The tournament where her team lost all four matches and she cried in the car on the way home, not because they lost but because she felt she played badly. I sat with her in the driveway and didn’t try to fix it. I just said, “That’s a hard feeling. What do you want to do next week?” She didn’t know. And that was okay.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me before we signed up: club volleyball asks a lot of a family, and you have to be honest about what you can give. It’s not just about the money. It’s about the calendar. It’s about the weekends when your kids’ friends are having birthday parties and she can’t go. It’s about a Tuesday night when you’re exhausted from work and you still have to drive her to practice and sit in the car for ninety minutes because it’s too far to go home and come back.
But it’s also about watching her learn to manage frustration, to listen to a coach’s correction, and to be accountable to a team. Those aren’t volleyball skills. Those are life skills, though I hate that phrase. Let me say it differently: she learned that if she wants to get better at something, she has to practice the uncomfortable part, not just the fun part. That’s a bigger lesson than any net play.
If you’re thinking about club volleyball, here are a few concrete things I’d suggest, based on our experience:
First, talk to your kid about the commitment before tryouts. Be honest about what it means—missed birthday parties, early mornings, long drives. Don’t let them sign up thinking it’s just another game. Ask them why they want to do it. If they say “because my friend is doing it,” that’s fine, but you’ll want to bring that up later if the novelty fades.
Second, talk to the club director or coach before you commit. Ask about their philosophy on playing time, how they handle different skill levels, and what a typical practice looks like. Don’t be intimidated—you’re the parent, and you’re making a significant investment. A good coach will answer you clearly. A bad coach will make you feel silly for asking. That’s your answer.
Third, set a boundary with yourself. Decide ahead of time that you will not judge your child’s experience by how much they play. That’s hard for me. It still is. But watching her on the bench, I realized she was learning more than I was learning. She was learning to be a good teammate. She didn’t need me to rescue her from an uncomfortable situation. She needed me to show up, hand her a snack, and ask her what she learned.
We’re in the middle of our second season now. She’s still not the star. She’s become a solid defensive player who gets her share of time. The drive is still long, and the Sundays are still busy. But she’s the one who reminds me when practice is on Tuesday. She’s the one who packs her own knee pads and water bottle. She’s the one who, after a bad tournament loss, says “there’s always next week.”
I don’t know how long this will last. Maybe she’ll burn out in middle school. Maybe she’ll quit for music or theater or just because she’s done. I’m not attached to the outcome. What I’m attached to is the fact that she made a choice, she followed through, and she found something worth working hard for—even on the days when that work wasn’t fun.
Club volleyball isn’t for every kid. But it was right for mine, in ways I didn’t see coming. And honestly, I’m still learning the side of the court I’m supposed to be on.
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