Now Entering the Hell that is Club Volleyball

OK, so a little background. My youngest, now 13, has really gotten into volleyball. She's fairly tall -- already 5-foot-8 and still growing (plenty of tall genes bouncing around our family) -- moves very well and has quick hands. She's also very, very bright and is a teacher's/coach's dream. She played middle/front for her 7th grade team and did pretty well (at least as far as my untrained eye could see; her school had four 7th-grade teams, and she played extensively for the #1 team). As the school season drifted toward the end, talk among the other girls/parents turned to club volleyball. Mom and I were non-committal, until the school season ended and we realized how much we had enjoyed it. So, four months later, here we are ...

The club for which she's playing has several different levels, and she tried out for and "signed" with one a couple of levels down from the top. I think she could definitely have played at least one level higher (what her club calls its "national" team), but Mom and I weren't quite ready to make both the financial and time commitment the higher levels involve. Even this level seems pretty involved.

I guess my question to the board is this: Just how big of an ass-whipping are my wife and I facing?

 

If she's any good, they'll start recruiting you for the higher club very quickly -- especially as other kids drop out when their playing time and role aren't what the kids or parents expected. (No direct knowledge of volleyball, some secondhand info from friends, but that movement/ego/frustration is a staple of the whole club movement.)

OTOH you're hanging out with Texas volleyball moms, and what can be wrong with that?

 

My niece's first 14U Regional tournament is Saturday. She reports for Game 1 at 7:30 a.m. and the family is on notice the medal round isn't expected to be over until 7-8 p.m.

The club coach has already "strongly recommended" players make an "exclusive time commitment." She was going to be the 6th-8th man on her school basketball team, so she quit.

The club team has a basic $500 fee for its 10-week winter program. That includes two 2- hour practices per week and six tournaments (2 home, 4 at other locations across the state). In March she will try out (or be called up) to the Spring Regional team, which offers another 10 weeks for another $500.

Of course, this will require a lot of coordination, since Mom is coaching two other sisters in basketball for the next seven weeks -- and will be helping to run a kiddie hoops clinic for yet another sister for two of THOSE weeks. Oh and Bro-16 is on his HS chess team; at least on one Saturday, she's going to have all 5 kids involved in sports/games at the same time.

 

Can't speak to club volleyball but one of my nephews is all up in some travel baseball and the time suck is gigantic.

Every summer weekend is a trip somewhere to play. His travel ball coach is a college head coach, who has a son on the team and their gear is college caliber.

And my nephew is 6-1 and 180 as a seventh grader and already could make a strong case to be the best male athlete at the school.

The only good thing is because his dad coaches high school football, the nephew gets out of the fall ball shit and it isn't a year around commitment like some of them have.

 

For the first time since he was a U-10, my son is not playing club soccer this year (he's a high-school junior). He might play D-3 in college, he might not because he said he's not going to some random small school just to play, and he simply wanted a break. I miss watching him play, but not the travel to and from practices and the two-game-on-every-weekend routine. Plus saving about $800 bucks is nice too, and he'll still make the varsity as a senior anyway.

 

My youngest is really into soccer and is pretty good (great skills, even better head for the game, tough as nails but lacks athleticism -- the fault of my genes), and was with an academy team at age 8-9. But when the time came to move up to club/select, we talked to people with kids in various programs about the experience and decided not to do it. She's played rec soccer ever since and is just as happy, and we're happier because we have a lot more money and time than we would have had otherwise.

 

Lacrosse camps / clubs have gone beyond absurd. Not sure about other sports, but many D1 coaches get non-binding verbal "commitments" from high school freshmen.

9th graders. Before they've possibly completed any growth spurts, and before they've played against varsity competition.

 

We were involved in girls club volleyball for 3 years in Southern California. I wanted my daughter to find an activity during junior high that could carry over to high school that would have her with a group of girls that she could become good friends with. She picked the activity and chose volleyball over soccer, basketball, softball, drill team, dance, music, etc. It didn't actually work out that way, but the organization of the Southern California Volleyball Association was incredible. We were in a top-level club, but on middle- to lower-level team. The cost rose to about $4,000 a year for a six-month season, preceded by two months of practice. From January to June there were one or two tournaments a month and two to three 2-hour practices a week. The tournaments lasted either from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. or 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturdays or Sundays. Most of them were in the morning grouping and had us traveling anywhere from Pomona to San Diego.
For upper-level to even middle-level players, this is a golden ticket to a college scholarship.

 

The question -- one of them, anyway -- is whether the cost of the club is worth the benefit of the scholarship (especially if it's just a partial scholarship).

 

College Athletic Scholarship Limits - Scholarship Stats.com

That's the list of number of scholarships per sport. For women's volleyball. It is a head count scholarship, which means only full scholarships can be offered. For the non-head count ones, the scholarships can be split among more than one player.

The Times did a series a few years ago about how kids and parents were spending thousands on these club teams, only to get a small amount of scholarship money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/sports/10scholarships.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Constantly reading about everyone's club sport pressures and complaints make me glad my kids just are in special needs soccer and baseball programs. All they do is have fun, and no score is kept. Everyone's smiling at the end of each "game".

 

The chances of getting a scholarship are well below 1 percent. It is not a factor that should count in anyone's thnking ever.

 

#scam