Why You Should Probably Just Let Your Kid Try Club Volleyball Already
Let me preface this by saying I was the parent that rolled my eyes at club sports for years. My older boy did rec soccer when he was 10, quit after a season because he’d rather play Minecraft, and I was fine with that. I thought all club stuff was just overbearing parents and overpriced gear and kids getting burnt out before they hit high school. So when my 12-year-old Lila came home from spring rec volleyball last year, covered in neon orange Gatorade sticky, begging me to let her try out for the local club, I said no. Three times.
She kept at it, though. Drew me a crayon picture of her jumping to hit a ball, taped it to the fridge. Brought it up every Sunday at dinner. Mentioned how her rec team coach said she had good reflexes and should try club. Eventually I caved, agreed to go to the parent info meeting just to get her off my back, no promises.
The meeting was at a gym on the west side of town, the one with the weird mildewy carpet in the lobby that smells like old socks and lemon disinfectant. I got there early, grabbed a sad gas station black coffee on the way, found a seat in the back. A minute later a mom sat down next to me, set down her fancy lavender iced latte from that new boutique coffee shop downtown, pulled out a monogrammed notebook. I wasn’t paying attention, halfway through the coach’s speech I reached over and grabbed her latte instead of my coffee, took a huge sip. I didn’t realize until she looked at me, and I just froze, sputtered out an apology, offered to Venmo her right then for a new one, she laughed it off but I wanted to crawl under the folding table. That’s how my introduction to club volleyball started, me with a mouthful of lavender latte I didn’t pay for, red as a tomato.
Tryouts went better than expected, honestly. Lila threw up a little in the parking lot before going in, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and walked in anyway. She got accepted to the entry-level development team, not the fancy elite one that travels all over the state, which I was relieved by. That’s when I made my first big mistake: I went full first-time panic and dropped over $200 on all new gear. Brand name volleyball, brand new knee pads with no holes, a fancy team backpack with the club logo stitched on the front. Two weeks in, she lost one of the new knee pads at practice, and the coach’s 13-year-old daughter gave her a beat-up gray hand-me-down that had a unicorn drawn on the side in pink sharpie. Lila’s worn that one ever since. The new matching set is still crumpled in the back of her closet. So that’s my unasked-for tip: don’t buy all new stuff first. Ask around. Every volleyball parent I know now has a garbage bag full of old gear in their garage they’re dying to get rid of. Saves you so much money and stress.
The team has practice twice a week after school and 6 a.m. on Saturdays. 6 a.m. I used to sleep until 8:30 on Saturdays, stay up late watching bad reality TV, wake up slow with a second cup of coffee. Now I’m up at 5:15, fumbling around making peanut butter toast that’s always too dry because I haven’t had my coffee yet, driving 25 minutes across town. I complained about this to my sister nonstop for the first two months. But here’s the weird, unexpected thing: I now look forward to that 20 minutes I sit in my car in the gym parking lot before practice starts. No one’s texting me to pick up milk, my son’s back home sleeping in, no one needs me to fix a snack or help with a last-minute math homework problem. I just sit there with my coffee, read my terrible paperback mystery, and it’s the only real quiet I get all week. I never would’ve guessed that – hated the early wake up, ended up with free quiet time I didn’t know I needed.
First scrimmage back in September, I got way too into it. Lila was standing there, the ball was coming right to her, and I yelled “GO GET IT LILA, MOVE TOWARDS THE NET!” She turned around, bright red, mouthed “STOP YELLING MOM” so loud the whole row of parents turned to look. The dad next to me snickered into his hoodie. I didn’t say a word for the rest of the scrimmage, just sat there and sipped my water. Turns out, most of the parents just sit there and scroll on their phones anyway, no one’s yelling like you see in those crazy viral TikTok videos. Yeah, there’s one dad who yells sometimes, but everyone just kind of ignores him. It’s not that big of a deal.
It’s not all great, don’t get me wrong. Last month we drove an hour and a half for a one-day tournament, and Lila got benched the whole day. She messed up three serves in a row at the previous tournament, so the coach sat her to “give her time to refocus.” She sat on the hard bleacher bench the entire time, didn’t get in a single point. After the last game she came out to the car, and cried for 45 minutes straight. Her favorite blue raspberry slushie melted all over the fabric seat, I couldn’t fix it, I couldn’t yell at the coach (well, I wanted to, but I bit my tongue) because it’s part of it, right? We drove home, stopped for greasy burgers, she went to bed early, and I sat on the couch thinking maybe I made a huge mistake, maybe this whole thing is just stupid and a waste of money.
But the next week, she stayed after practice to practice serves. She texted me halfway through, said “come in here, watch me.” I went in, and she got 11 serves over the net in a row. Grinned so wide her dimples showed. That’s just how it goes, I guess. Some days it sucks, some days it’s the best thing she ever did.
I still think it’s too expensive, I still hate packing the cooler for tournaments at 5 a.m., I still find neon ankle tape in the washing machine that gets all over my good sweaters. It doesn’t get Lila a college scholarship, not right now anyway, and maybe she’ll quit next year and want to do art club instead. That’s fine. But if your kid is begging you to try it? You should probably just let them. It doesn’t have to be forever, it doesn’t have to be anything big. It just has to be their thing. Mine’s got a unicorn knee pad, a car full of permanent slushie stains, and more friends than she had when she just scrolls TikTok after school. That’s enough for me.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why You Should Probably Just Let Your Kid Try Club Volleyball Already