Now Entering the Hell that is Club Volleyball

Yeah, the reffing-other-matches deal sucks because the girls who tend to be the smartest, most attentive, know the rules best, tend to get roped into doing it again and again and again, which means they cannot sit and goof around with the rest of the team during their idle slots of the tournament, which actually is kinda important when you are dealing with a club team of players who do not know each other and do not see each other outside of volleyball. It's kind of hard to build the "team feeling" when essentially you're told to go sit in another gym for an hour while everyone else jokes around.

Similarly the parents of the designated-official girls tend to get ostracized from the parent grouping, since they usually go and sit side-court while their daughter is reffing lines.

Sis-13 has been one of two girls roped into this duty most often. She says she's probably not missing much -- when the team started to joke around between games of the infamous first tournament, CoachyBabe hauled them into the bathroom and scorched them out for not "feeling bad enough about a loss."

According to Coachy, after a pool-play loss in a Saturday-morning tournament scheduled to last 12-14 hours, you should be so distraught you should be barely able to speak for a couple of hours.

OK. Up-to-the moment update. StarSis assures me Sis-13 has not dropped off the team; apparently she (Mom) was told that the team had "decided not to play in this weekend's tournament."

I immediately piped up, "that kinda smells like bullshit to me, the President's Day tourney is a big big deal, they promo it for months on their website, the club has like a dozen teams competing in 4-5 different age groups, that's the kind of thing teams hardly ever drop out of."

Sis agreed, "yeah, it doesn't sound right to me either, but I emailed the club director and she said that was indeed the deal. And frankly it is OK with me because otherwise it would have fouled up our mini-family-vacation weekend and caused a lot of headaches for me, plus it gives Sis-13 another couple of weeks to get her head straight about volleyball."

I said, "Yeah, it does solve or maybe minimize a few difficult situations for you, but in the longer run, you have paid $450 in club fees plus a couple hundred bucks more in equipment fees, supposedly for the opportunity for Sis-13 to play in 10 fairly high-level tournaments. If the Starville Spikers VC decide to just drop one of those tourneys because they 'feel like it,' you are losing 10% of the value of the commodity you are paying for -- so if I were a parent (* personal comment: I don't pull this card very often *) I would probably call the director of the club and say, just offhandedly, that 'it would be nice if you schedule us in another tourney to make up for the one we missed.' "

Sis was noncommittal. She said her sneaking suspicion is there may have been some kind of internal rebellion among some of the other parents -- she suspects the 3 families from the same junior high program. Just hypothetically, if all 3 of them threatened to quit/drop off or demanded reassignment to some other team, etc etc, that's the kind of thing which might have forced a mysterious last-minute tournament dropout.

Sis-13 says she doesn't think so -- at least as far as she has heard, none of the other players have been making noises about how they'd rather be playing on another team.

StarSis says it's not a case of open rebellion, but the parents of the 'Suburban 3' from the school 30 miles away have indeed dropped quite a few "that's not how we did it on our *league championship team* ' muttered comments in-between matches, indicating they're not very happy with the direction of the team.

Problem is, at this point, what the hell are you going to do? Three weeks into a 10-week season? Switch them to another (presumably much better) team and force three other (presumably not all that good) players from other teams to join 'our' team?

(The three players incidentally are by no means the 3 best players on the team, although the one tallest/best player on the team is one of them, the other two are pretty much no better or worse than the other 6-7 players.)

Hopefully club management will be very very wary of what they do here, because in their range of possible responses, I'd say about 80% of them would set awful-to-disastrous precedents.

 

You need to play club for the repeatable actions that occur in volleyball over and over; it's like building up a number of at-bats. But club VB is not magic. It probably produces diminishing returns at some point, such as burnout.

Club VB exists to give college coaches an opportunity to see a mass of girls of once. It's a convenience for them, and a moneymaker for the club coaches/organizers. It exists as a vehicle for scouting.

Here's what scary: If there were no college VB, club ball would be a hell of a lot cheaper, because professional teams would simply select the players they want at a young age to develop, develop them, and remove the carrot club teams dangle over thousands of kids.

 

Sis-13 was on hand for the Panda game Saturday morning (details later) then took off for a sleepover party.

But mom StarSis reports that suspicions of an internal rebellion indeed came to pass: one of the three players from the suburb-school clique stormed off the court during a practice last week.

The next practice, literally minutes before practice time (some players live almost an hour away), Coachy Babe fired out an email announcing a change of practice location, from 10 miles away from Suburb-School district to 30 miles away.

To the shock of absolutely nobody, none of the Suburb 3 showed, and to the shock of nobody in the StarSis family, an email from the club directors arrived later that night (about 1 a.m. ) announcing a new coach would be taking over the team.

StarSis said, "I didn't join in the rebellion, but I sure as hell didn't object to it."

Since then, they've had 2 practices: Sis-13 reports everyone showed up (including the Suburb 3), the new coach is much nicer, much more positive, hasn't assigned any suicide sprints as punishments. ... and, oh yes, Sis-13 has been moved back to setter.

 

Kind of an interesting weekend aborning. DaughterQuant's team is scheduled for another two-day tournament, but from the looks of things they have definitely "scheduled up" in entering this one. For starters, they're seeded No. 4 in their pool which, if experience is telling, means that some ass-whippings are in store. Further, looking across the pools, there's another 13-U team from my daughter's club that ostensibly is two levels higher than my daughter's. I'm inferring, then, that there are lots of substantially higher-level teams in this tournament.

On the other hand, my daughter's team has made a rotation change that she tells me she loves. With the new rotation they had a practice match against a 13-U team that's ostensibly one level higher and won handily*. So, we'll see. My take is that if they win even a set in pool play today, that's a victory. Either way, MommaQuant and I have already come out ahead ... for the first time, DaughterQuant's pool play starts in the afternoon, meaning we didn't have to pile out of bed at 5:30 a.m.!


*Funny story about that. I'm not a big fan of that team or its coaches -- a bit mouthy (on the players' part) and a bit snarky (on the coaches' part) for my taste. Apparently, once my daughter's team got to match point in the second set (and they were up something like 24-14), the opposing coach called an abrupt end to the proceedings and put her little darlings into wind-sprint mode. Ah, yes ... sportsmanship at its finest.

 

That ass-whippin' I said I thought was on the agenda? I was right. Against the top-seeded team DaughterQuant's got beat 25-4 and 25-8.

 

DaughterQuant's team finished 3rd in the four-team pool, winning two sets. They were certainly good enough for second, but it's probably just as well because they weren't going far in the gold bracket, given the quality of teams in that one. In that bracket, the top seed in DaughterQuant's pool beat the second-highest team at her club about as handily as they beat DaughterQuant's team yesterday. What they were doing at this tournament was a topic of wide discussion.

In DaughterQuant's team's opening match of the silver bracket today they got absolutely blown out in the first set but blew the other team out in the second. In the tiebreaker, their weakest possible rotation got stuck out there too early and couldn't get off the court. By the time that crew rotated off, it was all but over, and they wound up losing 15-5.

DaughterQuant played her absolute worst stretch of volleyball in the first set but played reasonably well from then on. Her team got astonishingly good play from a girl who to this point has done absolutely nothing. Another father and I were sitting there saying, "Where in the hell has she been?" Unfortunately, other weak links were as weak/weaker than usual. And when the stronger players don't do well ...

I'm writing this in the parking lot waiting on DaughterQuant to finish her scoring duties. She can be pretty hard on herself, so it promises to be an interesting ride home.

 

Praise goes a long way. Tell her she has a fan club across the country. Go DQ!

 

One good thing about clubs is a bad team is a one-year thing; you're not stamped with failure for year after year.

On a school team, you can get locked into a loser mentality/reputation. If you're bad in 5th grade, you're probably going to be bad in 6th-7th-8th too -- or everyone will expect you to be.

In club sports, if the team is bad, half the roster is probably going to switch to other clubs and other teams the next season.

If you get on a real good team real young, THOSE teams to stay together, but bad teams scatter to the wind every year.

 

DaughterQuant wasn't exactly bouncing when she and MommaQuant came out of the facility on Sunday, but she certainly seemed none the worse for the wear of a well-below-her-standards day. Turns out MommaQuant remembered a policy that was in force last year in a development league that meant that DaughterQuant was due for an ice cream, and that had brightened the mood considerably.

A bit of back story: DaughterQuant is on an official club team now, but last spring she and her old YMCA teammates had a team in a Friday night development league run by this club. I can't recall all the ins and outs of how this worked out, but DaughterQuant's team in that league was coached by one of the higher-end coaches on retainer at this club. Now this coach, let's call her Vicki, was as sweet as could be off the court, but she was damn intense on the court. She didn't go for any of this wind-sprints-after-you-lose-a-set bullshit, but she meant for those girls to compete, and if they started dicking around she was on their asses in a hurry.

Well, turns out Vicki had a "policy" in place that if, in hitting a successful overhand shot, you hit a player on the other team, she would buy you an ice cream. It was really a joke, because even the best players couldn't hit a shot that another girl couldn't dodge. But I suspect she was making a point to hit your shot and not worry about the consequences.

Anyway, during the second set Sunday, DaughterQuant hit an overhead shot that was going to be about 10 feet long. For whatever reason -- this ball was a slow-moving floater if there ever was such a thing -- the opposition's backline player couldn't make up her mind to let it go and, at the last second, tried to make a play. She swung and she missed, and the ball hit her square in the face. Ding, ding, ding! Ice cream time.

Both MommaQuant and I wondered how DaughterQuant would deal with the bad day -- and, of course, after a shitty loss, DaughterQuant drew scorebook-keeper's duty again -- but MommaQuant remembered the old policy while walking out of the facility. Volleyball moms ... sometimes they can be a pain, but I have to believe that MommaQuant's the class of the field.

 

Ice cream bounties! Sean Payton approves.

 

Our Varsity volleyball coach who was a university student maybe 3 or 4 years older than most of us offered to buy a sixpack to anyone who blocked one of the hitters on one of the teams we would play. The hitter was so far above 99.9% of the league that it was a fantasy that anyone on our team would block him cleanly.

He eventually played for the Canadian National Team and became a cop in my home town. Can't imagine in this day and age if the "beer bounty" had got out what an uproar there would have been.

 

This story applies to the thread title.
I met MMT once or twice, read a lot about her, but can't honestly say I know her (she grew up in my hometown before moving to O.C). I have also met and talked several times with Rangel. His workout method is called Plyo-metrics. Karch Kiraly is among those, besides MMT, who swear by the method (it's a lot of jumping and agility movements). Oddly, he created Plyo-City and was it centered at American Sports Centers in Anaheim (current home base of the U.S. men's and women's Olympic teams). Now, he is competing against ASC. The writer's portrayal of Rangel is accurate, in my opinion. He is a big talker with big ideas, but rarely goes the distance. My daughter's high school coach brought in Rangel for extra training. We paid for 10 sessions and got, I think, 3 before he stopped showing up.

Behind the Misty May-Treanor training facility's bad bounce - The Orange County Register