Several people have asked me about the challenges of choosing or being chosen by a club program. I thought I would share my biases.
* Two days ago, I saw a story about the drop in participation in boys’ and girls’ basketball and girls’ volleyball in the state of Nebraska despite the continuing growth in the number of high school students. Why is this happening?
* Some club coaches encourage high school athletes to focus on club volleyball rather than play high school volleyball and discourage them from playing other sports. If a club has that as a policy, I would look for another club.
* The overwhelming percentage of athletes who have played volleyball at Nebraska were multi-sport athletes. I only coached one who only played volleyball, and she played high school and club volleyball.
* I have yet to meet a college or someone affiliated with USA Volleyball who doesn’t prefer recruiting athletes who have played more than one sport. If someone told me my daughter needed to focus only on one sport, I would try to find a different club. (We did that when a soccer club in Fort Collins told us our daughter would have to play only soccer.)
A few years back, every top college program recruited the #1 volleyball recruit in the country. Our daughter competed against this athlete in club volleyball. She could have been a dominant All-American as either an outside hitter or setter. It never happened.
She played in college but was limited to the backcourt because the club she played for kept her in the gym five or six days a week. Her body broke down when she was eighteen. Her club coach focused on his needs rather than the player. Unfortunately, this story can happen with any club sport, including volleyball, soccer, track, and competitive cheer teams. Athletes need a break. They do that when they rest or play another sport.
* One of the reasons that volleyball became a prominent sport in Nebraska is that the people coaching club volleyball also coached high school sports. They were teachers. If you look at the most successful college coaches, a high percentage were trained as teachers. Why is that? Teachers have taken courses in educational psychology. They have been trained to recognize patterns in learning and have a broader vision than just the sport they are coaching.
* Because volleyball became popular in Nebraska and elsewhere, larger clubs evolved. The primary motive of some larger clubs, but not all, is profit. The more teams they can have in each age group, the more money they will make. The top teams may be coached by experienced people, some of them high school coaches. However, a successful 16 #1 team does not mean that the same level of coaching is happening at the 16 #2 or #3 or #4 team.
* How much your daughter develops will depend on the level of coach your daughter learns from, not on which club she plays for. (Read that sentence again.)
* Two things have to happen for a player to develop. A head club coach needs to know how to teach fundamentals, break them down, evaluate what works for your daughter, and adjust their approach when development stalls.
While training is critical, your daughter must also have the opportunity to play. What if your option is to be on one team with great training, but she will only get to play a little, or be on another team, play a lot, with a less experienced coach? To some degree, that depends on the age of your daughter. The younger your daughter is, the more important it is to receive great training in fundamentals. Some clubs put their least experienced coaches with their youngest teams. This doesn’t happen when we teach reading and mathematics. It shouldn’t happen in club volleyball.
* Many club teams play too much, travel too much, and don’t train the fundamentals enough. I would much rather have my daughter learn from a teacher-coach and play locally and regionally than spend time and money flying to several qualifiers and national tournaments. Learning the correct footwork, sequencing, and arm swing to attack a volleyball is difficult. Blocking may even be more difficult. These skills, like setting, serving, passing, and digging, must be broken down for even the best athletes. Those skills have to become habits.
* Paying for extravagant uniforms and warmups is noise. It has no bearing on whether or not your daughter develops the skills to play on her high school team or whether she is recruited by a college program. I would be more concerned about the surface she is training and playing on. Plastic squares laid down on cement are not a suitable surface for volleyball.
* I would be less concerned about the names of players a club has produced who are playing for colleges and more focused on evidence that the coach who will be working with my daughter has a plan for how to teach the progressions in the fundamentals that will give my daughter the opportunity for success.
* My ideal number of players on a club team would be 9 or 10, with a maximum of 12. I understand that in smaller communities, there may be more girls who would not get an opportunity if a team was limited to that number. If a club has 14 or 15 players on the majority of its club teams, its priority isn’t development; it’s the club director’s retirement fund.
I understand your options may only meet some of the criteria I have listed above. If that is the case, the most important thing is that the person working with your daughter is more concerned with skill development than winning club volleyball matches. Your club coach is modeling what it means to be an adult you can trust. You want her to learn from a healthy human who combines joy with a lesson plan for your daughter’s development.
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