Volleyball Action

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03/26/2025 13:13

Subject: Volleyball Action

quote

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Training is important, but playing time is just as important so you can practice what you trained in real game setting. You can’t sacrifice one for the other.

It is very difficult to find a club to provide both good training and adequate playing time for all players to develop though.

Valid points, but as you note finding a club/team that checks all those boxes is challenging. Obviously, we all want our kids to get good training and to play and improve as much as possible, but what that looks like can vary drastically depending on the level of team, cost, and the abilities of the player. If your DD isn't athletically gifted (or really tall), and club volleyball is for fun, fitness, recreation, etc., your expectations should be different than someone who's DD is expecting to be recruited to play D1 volleyball.

As to how to what CHRVA might be able to do to elevate the level of play within the region, that's a tough question. In regions like North Texas there are multiple clubs that are qualifying teams for nationals in the open division every year (clubs like TAV, Drive Nation, Excel, Mad Frog, Skyline, etc). A talented player has multiple choices of clubs that are competing at highest level so they don't need to settle for being the the 14th or 15th girl on the bench to be on a high level team. In CHRVA on the other hand, outside of Metro and Paramount, there are no clubs with a realistic shot of getting an open bid in most years, so a high level player has to choose between possibly not playing as much on a team from one of these clubs or playing on a lower level team. It's not clear right now whether there are any other CHRVA clubs ready to step up to that next level as the number of players increases. There are of course great individual teams at other CHRVA clubs, but there isn't a club that is consistently fielding strong teams at most age groups year after year. Building a club to compete at that level requires assembling the right coaches and facilities and aggressively going after the best players in the off season. Paramount in particular actively recruits high potential players which is one of the reasons they've been able to have success in a relatively short time since the club was started.

The strategy that many clubs seem to be taking right now is to just go to more qualifiers and other travel tournaments and market themselves as being a club that competes against high level teams from across the country. Unfortunately, in many cases that is just costing families a lot of money to travel all over the country to not do particularly well in these tournaments.

I could see MVSA having a chance to become a club that competes at a higher level. Since Paramount is in Virginia and Metro is in DC, MVSA could use the geography to their advantage. Unfortunately, they tend to give preference to their returning players, even those who are not particularly gifted. In these conditions, the top MVSA players get frustrated and try to find a better home (which means Metro in many cases).

Clubs like MVSA and MOCO lose players to Metro and Paramount every year. Blue Ridge is great partly because they are farther away.

Does CHRVA have enough good players for a third open-level team? The region can select all-stars from clubs other than Metro Travel and Paramount, regional first, second, or third teams for example, and see if they can beat Metro Travel or Paramount.