Why I Actually Signed My 12-Year-Old Up For Club Volleyball (And Didn’t Regret It… Mostly)
I was sitting on the sticky aluminum bleachers at our local rec center last January, picking crumbs of a cold cheddar stick off my old college sweatpants, when my daughter’s rec coach wandered over and dropped the question. “Have you ever thought about club?” I almost choked on the crumb I was chewing. I’d heard all the stories: parents spending a kid’s college fund on travel and gear, 13-year-olds with overuse knee injuries, screaming dads that get kicked out of tournaments for yelling at teen refs. My kid just liked hitting the ball around after practice and making fun of my terrible warm-up dances. I didn’t see why we needed to mess with that.
But I brought it up over pepperoni pizza that night, expecting her to say no—she liked having her weekends free to hang out with her best friend and binge that silly mermaid show they’re obsessed with. Instead she dropped her half-eaten slice and stared at me like I’d just offered her a pony. “Really? Can we? Please?” So I started looking into it, and that’s when the first awkward thing happened. I showed up to the open tryout with the wrong shoes. She had her old white PE sneakers, the ones with the scuffed toe from kicking the playground wall, and everyone else had those fancy non-marking volleyball shoes with the extra arch support. She spent the whole first 10 minutes hiding behind a water cooler, whispering that everyone was looking at her. I wanted to grab her hand and leave, tell her this was stupid, we could just go get ice cream and forget the whole thing. But the coach waved her over, and she went.
I spent that whole tryout pacing the parking lot, checking my phone every two minutes, convinced I’d messed her up. Turns out I messed up more when I went to buy gear after she made the team. I read some random mom forum that said you needed high-end knee pads to avoid injury, so I dropped $80 on these thick black ones with all the extra padding. She put them on for the first practice, and all the other girls had those thin plain $20 ones from Target. She told me on the drive home that she looked like a battle droid from Star Wars. I felt terrible, offered to buy new ones that night, but she just shrugged and said she’d deal with it. She still wears them, by the way. The logo’s worn off now, and they have a permanent coffee stain from when I spilled my gas station coffee on them last month, but she says they’re broken in right now, so she’s not switching.
I work part time at the elementary school front office, so I rearranged my schedule to make the two practices a week, 45 minutes each way from our house. We stop at the same gas station every practice night, she gets a blue Gatorade and a pack of Sour Patch Kids, and she always leaves the half-eaten pack in the cup holder, so by Friday the whole car smells like sour sugar and it’s sticky if you set your phone down. I used to get mad about it, now I just wipe it up when I fill up on Saturday. The tournaments are all day Saturday, sometimes Sunday too. Once I misread the schedule and showed up an hour and a half early. We sat in that freezing gym, the heaters weren’t working, and she just complained the whole time that I ruined her pre-game nap, and I bought a $3 coffee from the vending machine that tasted like burnt cardboard, and we both just sat there mad at each other. That same day, she played terrible in the first set, the coach sat her the whole second, and she cried in the bathroom between sets. I stood outside the door, wanting to tell her we could just leave and never come back, but then I heard her blow her nose and fix her hair, and she walked out to the bench for the third set.
I went into this whole thing ready to be the chill parent, the one that doesn’t scream at refs or care about win-loss records. Because when I was a kid, my mom did club soccer with me, and she yelled so loud at a ref once I wanted to disappear through the ground, and I quit after a year and never touched a ball again. So I promised I’d be different. But last month, at the regional tournament, my daughter was serving match point, and I caught myself leaning so far forward on the bleacher I was almost falling off, my hands were clenched so tight my nails left marks in my palms, and I almost yelled out loud before I clamped my mouth shut. I caught the eye of the mom I sit next to every tournament, and she just grinned and shook her head at me, like she gets it. That’s the thing no one tells you: most of the parents aren’t crazy. Yeah, there’s that one dad that yells at every call, but everyone else just sits there scrolling their work emails, or trading snacks, or complaining about how the gym is always either too hot or too cold. Karen, the mom I sit with, brings burnt chocolate chip cookies every tournament, and they’re actually really good, crispy around the edges. She told me her husband left last year, and club volleyball gives her kid something to do that isn’t sitting at home moping, so it’s worth every penny. I get that.
I got the club credit card charge in the mail this morning, and I stared at it for a minute, because it’s more than I spend on groceries some months. I didn’t even know you could apply for a fee reduction until I asked, I just assumed we couldn’t afford it, and the club didn’t make a big deal out of it, just cut it in half and never said anything to anyone. That’s another thing no one tells you, by the way—it doesn’t have to be for rich kids only. Her team got 5th out of 8 teams at last weekend’s tournament, no trophies, just a couple of cheap stickers they got at the snack bar. Right now, her dusty knee pads are sitting on my kitchen table, half under a granola bar wrapper she left there. She’s upstairs texting her teammates, planning a sleepover before the next tournament, laughing so loud I can hear it through the floor.
Some days she comes home from practice grumpy, says she hates her coach, says she wants to quit. I never push her to stay, I just let her rant, and most of the time by the next morning she’s laying her uniform out on the bed before I even wake up. I don’t know if she’ll play in high school, or college, or if this whole thing will amount to anything more than sticky car cup holders and expensive coffee and burnt cookies. I don’t have any great, neat advice, really. If your kid is asking, or your coach mentions it, you don’t have to write it off immediately like I did. It’s messy, it’s inconvenient, it costs too much money, but it’s hers. That’s enough, I think, most days.
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