Club Volleyball 2016 Edition

The PT issue comes down to pretty much the whole reason you would play club volleyball: game experience.

The way it was set for the first three weeks on the Starrville Spikers, essentially they had their six starters, three part-time subs who would rotate in for maybe 1/4 of the game, and three end-benchers who barely played at all (or, in one case, none).

None of the players owe anything to this "team." Nobody wakes up in the morning dreaming of leading the Starrville Spikers on to the glory of victory. It's an economic transaction: the players invest their practice time and effort and entry fees, and they're supposed to get PT which will benefit them in high school competition. If the club doesn't deliver, fuck 'em.

 

True, but you stick a player with little ability out there, and nobody's getting any experience. As one of DaughterQuant's coaches -- a former D1 libero -- said at lunch Saturday, "The ball will find you." You stick a weak passer out there and suddenly every serve is coming her way and your offense grinds to a halt. Your setter starts putting them shoulder high and suddenly your hitters are simply scraping the ball out of the net. And if your middle can't move, she's going to get dinked to death.

In a legitimate competition, all the pieces have to be there, or it's simply not volleyball.

At DaughterQuant's club, they're explicit in saying that if you want guaranteed playing time, there are city and Y leagues available. If you join with them, you're only guaranteed practice time (which is extensive and high quality).

Good friend of mine has a granddaughter who played at that club. She became a badass libero/hitter in college and, in her senior year, was named her mid-D1 conference's player of the year. But her sophomore year in high school, at that club she moved up to one of its national travel teams. They went off to some monster tournament in Florida, and her parents popped for airfare, etc., to go watch. She never got on the court.

 

Nobody on the team is of "little" ability: virtually all of them were/are well-above-average players for their age group/grade level.

Last fall, as a freshman at a Class A high school, Sis-14, a setter, was by far the best player on the freshman team. The last two weeks of the season she was moved up to JV and immediately started there too.

On the club team, she was one of the part-time (1/4 time) players (which of course is way better than being an end-bencher who never plays period). She has shown up for every minute of every practice (involving a 25-mile, 40-minute drive each way by parents).

Which isn't always a totally productive strategy since the coaches' practice plan includes random warmup-style back-and-forth hittting for the first 15-20 minutes of each 90-minute practice, a highly ineffective strategy in producing high-intensity focused workouts, but very effective in producing general fucking-around.

At least in the days of the 12-player roster, 3-4 players would consistently saunter in 10-15 minutes late for practice with some excuse (traffic jam or caught at railroad crossing). Coaches pretty much waved it off by saying, "practice doesn't really get going for about 20 minutes anyway." There were no PT consequences for the stragglers.

Of course her parents say Sis-14 is hard-working and attentive in practice, and no coaching staff member has ever said anything otherwise either to her directly or the team in general, so practice effort can't really be the issue. She's well-versed in most offensive sets and passing attacks.

On the court, the team has been well under .500, certainly attributable to high levels of competition, but at the same time there are no individuals on the team so outstanding they are clearly carrying the team to overall domination. And at the same time, when the "part-timers" came in to play, there was no noticeable dropoff in the level of team performance, so the argument couldn't really be made, "well, A-B-C-D-E-F have to play 85% of the time, because the second G-H-I come in, everything goes to hell."

Anyway this is all mostly a moot argument because the club management did agree that 12 players was too many to have on the roster and cut back to 8-9, but now there's this second crisis with several families/players threatening to quit and reduce the roster to 6. But this club had a similar midseason blowup last year and ended up firing half its coaching staff and reshuffing the rosters then too. There just doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot of thought put into how the teams and rosters should be structured.

 

Sudden shocking update: After slogging through another month of club volleyball, with playing time issues resolved (8 players on the team so everybody plays) if not performance level ( the team sucks), Sis-14 decided pretty much on the drop of a dime last week to go out for HS softball.

The club VB season still isn't done for 6 weeks and StarSis and hubby have paid in some big bucks, so Sis-14 will play out the season in volleyball.

But the VB team is made up of girls from schools scattered over half the state. The softball team is all her friends and classmates.

 

Not much to report on the Team DaughterQuant front. Just came off a three-week tournament-a-week stretch featuring three second-place finishes in pool play, three opening-match losses in gold-medal bracket play, and a 1-2 record in follow-up consolation matches. One of those consolation losses was particularly painful, as it was a three-setter to the other "Elite" team from Team DaughterQuant's club. It appears some rotation changes are in the making, as girls who had been regulars at the start of the season have begun to be edged out. Lacy, mentioned earlier, is now playing extensively, and Autumn has begun to appear even in bracket play. DaughterQuant continues to play well -- she, the setter, one hitter and the other middle make up the core of the team -- and is a blast to watch. Only two tournaments left this season, but DaughterQuant's making noises about playing in the club's summer sand (two-girl) league. Rather looking forward to it.

 

This post is about as exciting as the return of the X-Files. Much less hype, though.

 

Bad, bad day with Team DaughterQuant back in action at an unbelievably huge tournament -- there are more than 100 courts in use at any moment -- in Dallas. Team DQ had a good start with a straight-set victory in its first match, but then after a very long wait ran into some bad luck: DaughterQuant severely sprained her ankle about 10 points into the second match and was done for the day (and likely the tournament and maybe the season).

She went down hard and in a hurry and was in severe pain. She, like me and MommaQuant, was clearly thinking about more than volleyball: The Sound of Music, with DaughterQuant as Maria, is only three weeks away. When the tournament trainer did his thing and declared there to be no fracture, DaughterQuant burst into tears in relief. The trainer kept talking about the tournament, but I know what was going on in her head.

Team DQ did OK in her absence -- her coaches cobbled together a makeshift rotation and they managed to win that first set -- but lost both remaining matches.

The trainer said to come back tomorrow and he'll tape her up and see how it goes. I am not at all inclined to push anything. Guess with taping she can't do any more damage (if she's good to go) but I am going to be shittin' bricks ...

 

On the Starrville volleyball front, the softball season got under way this week with Sis-14 (actually about to become Sis-15) on the jayvee team.

On Wednesday night StarSis gets a call from the varsity softball coach. The JV had its first two dates rained out (and won't be rescheduled) so he wanted to pull Sis-14 up to varsity as a pinch-runner/ defensive sub, but probably only on a one or two-game basis.

Eligibility is set on a total-games basis so Sis-14 is not risking any eligibility problems by sitting on the varsity bench a couple games. So StarSis said OK, plus, as she added, "if you get in the game and steal a base or get a hit, you might not go back down anyway."

But another factor was the varsity softball doubleheader was set for 4 pm Friday and likely to get over about 8.

Sis-14 had a huge volleyball tournament 200 miles away in Indiana at 8 am today. So she had to play out the softball games (she did get in the game, caught a fly ball and scored a run), mad-dash home for a 5-minute scrub-shower, then the whole family (all the girls anyway) piles in the van and heads for Indiana.

Sis texted to report they got into the hotel about midnight (11 local time) and everybody was sacked out within 20 minutes.

Sis-14 was on the court bright and early at 8 in the morning. Mom and three sisters were much less perky slumped over in the bleachers on their rolled up sleeping bags.

Over the course of the day the Starrville Spikers went 2-6 in pool play, the final match wrapping up about 9 pm. That's about consistent with their season performance.

Sunday they're in some kind of consolation bracket, and could play as few as two or as many as six matches. Sis reports she has "high hopes of being on the road by lunchtime."

 

Forget the soft bigotry of low expectations. This sounds more like the quiet desperation of sleep deprivation.

 

No Willis Reed moments this afternoon. DaughterQuant had an OK night and was up to see how a professional tape job would go. They told Mom and me she really couldn't hurt anything by trying. She started to warm up and looked OK ... but then, beginning to lose herself in the moment, she tried a cut.

Uh, no ...

Team DQ won, and DaughterQuant put on a brave face on the bench. Kids ... they got more ways to break your heart than you could shake a stick at ...

 

The Starrville Spikers opened play in Indiana this morning at 8 with a loss and "advanced" to play some kind of abysmal team an hour later in the lower bracket eliminations, picking up a win.

This advanced them to a "classification match" at 10 which would have put them in the lower bracket medal rounds with a win, guaranteeing them three more matches during the day and probably not getting them out of town until 6 (and thus home about 9-9:30).

Shoeless Joe Jackson would have been proud, Sis reported. "We were on the road by 11," she reported happily. 25-6 and 25-3.

 

DQ, just an editorial comment: did a real live doctor look at Daughter Q's ankle before issuing the "she can't hurt it any more" pronouncement?

I can't imagine telling (or even allowing) a kid to play in a meaningless offseason club tournament with anything more than a micro-hangnail. Especially without X-rays in this day of stress fractures, lisfranc fractures, etc etc etc. I wouldn't take any "trainer's" word for it; I'd want an orthopedic specialist.

I've talked it over with Sis a few times. Her policy is, if it's anything more than a shake-it-off owie, they sit out. Nobody will know or care in 3 days if the Starrville Spikers finished 6th or 13th in the Indiana Whoopdeedoo Tourney, but a fucked-up ankle can screw you for a whole season.