Volleyball club- recap and thoughts

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07/09/2024 19:05

Subject: Re:Volleyball club- recap and thoughts

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

As to the idea of doing a power league format instead of a one-day bid regional tournament, I don't think this would result in any meaningful difference in the teams that rise to the top. Again using 17s an an example, I think it's pretty clear for this age group that Metro, VA Elite, Paramount, and Blue Ridge are the top teams in CHRVA...And playing at more qualifiers gets the players more exposure to college coaches - 11 players from 17 Travel are committed to D1 schools. VA Elite 17s has 4 D1 commits so far.

If your goal is to get a player recruited, then there's no reason to care much about the region as a whole. But the discussion is why CHRVA isn't doing as well as expected -- and a lot of it tracks back to exactly the reasoning you gave above -- a focus on recruiting rather than competitive improvement as a whole. Those regions all have more D1 players across their teams, so the power league doesn't hurt recruiting at all. They still attend qualifiers. What the other regions have realized is that there is no value in having only 3-4 "best" teams and then having the rest of the regions clubs be feeder systems into those teams. Instead, they focus on having 10-12 competitive teams.

There's always a chance that one of our teams catches lightning in a bottle and does great at nationals, but if we want consistent performances every year then the focus would need to switch to developing many, many more players than the 15 you cited above. For those families currently in the recruiting cycle and clubs who market heavily based on recruiting there are lots of reasons not to do this, so there is little to no interest in making meaningful structural improvements to the way the region develops a broad base of talent.

But forcing these teams to play each other within the region isn't going to do anything to raise the level of CHRVA teams against the rest of the country - playing in Open at National Qualifiers is the way to get exposure to the top teams in the country. Metro, Paramount, and VA Elite all went to 3 or 4 qualifiers playing in the Open division. While none of them earned an Open bid, playing at those tournaments helps them improve far more than playing each other week after week vying for a National bid.

Let's agree to disagree on that. If your DD plays for one of those clubs, then you likely believe this statement. But its not relevant to improving the region as a whole.

Compared to other regions, too many of the "top" teams take too many players, b/c there is a belief around DC that if you don't play for the top teams, you can't get recruited. Coming from a region with many more D1 recruits, there was a different mentality: you develop the fastest by playing a large number of meaningful points in tournaments and by maximizing touches in practice. As a result, team sizes were smaller so more players play in tournaments and more players get exposure to coaches at those tournaments -- and more get recruited. For comparison, here's the team sizes from the AAU Open finals this year:
16: Mintonette-11, Skyline-13
17: Tribe-11, Sports Performance-9

For comparison, here's our USAV national team sizes:
16: Paramount-15
17: Metro-15, VA Elite-13

And the players on the AAU teams played significant minutes and points. Now head to BallerTV and count how many players on our teams barely see the court during a match this week. There is very little competitive benefit if you never see the court, play garbage time points or get in for just a few rotations. You'd be better off getting extra hours in the practice gym. And the # of players also impacts the # of touches players get in practice -- especially in competitive gameplay drills where research has shown the most substantial player development occurs.

Here's a fun game -- head to AES and sort any of the top regions like NO, FL, DE, HA by national rank for virtually any age group. Then check the top 5 teams for how many players are on their roster. CHRVA's average is 14! players, and that's with Blue Ridge only taking 10.

PP- really valuable perspective- thank you for taking the time to type this out- such rationale and thoughtful insight. Unfortunately CHRVAs first challenge is to get out of the paramount or metro or you won't get recruited menatlity. Paramount and Metro actively recruit and contribute to the problem by stacking their benches. There are plenty of teams in the region, that's not the issue.

I agree that the objective of club volleyball should be more than getting players recruited to play in college, however it is also clear that for the players needed for a team to compete at the open level nationally, that recruiting success is going to be an important factor in attracting the best players. It would be great if there were many CHRVA clubs to choose from that had a solid history of helping girls get recruited, but that isn't currently the case. So while getting players recruited shouldn't be CHRVA's primary goal, it is indisputably something that successful clubs have to offer in order to be competitive.

According to the NCAA (https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2015/3/2/estimated-probability-of-competing-in-college-athletics.aspx), around 3.9% of high school volleyball players will compete in the NCAA, and 1.2% will go to a D1 school. There are other opportunities to play collegiately at non-NCAA programs too. So doing a little back of the envelope math for the class of 2025 (current 17s who have been recruitable for over a year), if you look at AES, there were 132 CHRVA 16s teams last season (using last year because the number of girls playing club tends to drop off after 16s - according to AES there were only 84 17s CHRVA teams this season). Assuming an average of 12 players per team (obviously some have more and some have less and some girls don't play with the age group that aligns with their HS grad year) x 132 teams, that means there were around 1,584 girls playing club volleyball in the region from the class of 2025. Using the NCAA percentages, there would be approximately 62 girls expected to play NCAA volleyball from CHRVA. Of those, about 19 would be expected to be D1.

Now looking at the data from PrepDig (which is probably not 100% accurate but not sure of a better source), from the class of 2025 there are currently 24 CHRVA players committed to play D1 indoor volleyball. In terms of the club breakdown (using the club these players are currently shown as playing for), 14 are from Metro, 4 are from VA Elite, 3 are from Paramount, 1 is from MVSA, 1 is from CEVA, and 1 is from Blue Ridge. There are 4 D3 commitments shown as well, but D3 schools tend to recruit later so this is probably not at all reflective of what the final tally will be be for this class year.

So what does this data suggest? CHRVA seems to be outperforming expectations in terms of the number of D1 commits (24 committed versus 19 expected). The breakdown of commits from CHRVA clubs is pretty lopsided with Metro having the majority of players committed to play D1.

So in terms of the discussion of how to improve the level of CHRVA teams on the national level I'm not sure what actions the region could take. Obviously if the ~7 non-starters on the Metro Travel teams were distributed among other competitive teams, that might increase parity within the region a little bit but I don't know if it would result in any improvement in how any of these teams perform against open teams from other regions. And it's not clear how CHRVA could do this anyway - USAV caps the roster size at 15 and I doubt CHRVA would be allowed to set a lower cap. It's also not reasonable to expect individual players who want to play D1 volleyball to go to another club if they get an offer from Metro. The data suggests that playing for a Metro Travel team does give an advantage in getting recruited and pretty much every player on a Metro Travel team hopes to play in college.

Having watched some of the better open teams at 16s, 17s, and 18s, there are very few teams that are taller or more athletic than Metro Travel teams, but the teams that beat Metro tend to be better at ball control (i.e., defense and setting) and make fewer unforced errors. That is often assumed to be from coaching or other training that these teams must do better, and that might be part of the difference, but I also think the point that was made earlier in this thread about the number of first generation players in CHRVA versus regions where volleyball has been popular for decades and one or both parents played competitive volleyball is probably true. Also, the importance Metro places on height and raw athleticism when choosing teams often means they are taking players without as many years playing experience than those that are playing on these other teams and that difference in experience/skill is their advantage.

The problem of how to improve the level of CHRVA volleyball is a challenging one. Lots of issues have been identified in many posts here, but I haven't seen any realistic solutions offered yet and I'm not sure there is a silver bullet. Unfortunately, I think any improvement is going to be slow and incremental. Assuming the level of interest in volleyball continues to increase, more girls will play volleyball and more teams/clubs will be created to provide a place for them to play. Hopefully most of these teams will provide good experiences for their players and some will emerge as alternatives to the status quo.

There are three atleast from VAJRs that are D1- Georgia State, JMU, UVA.

The more startling statistic is how often these kids play….which is very rarely. This is not unusual at the upper echelon colleges - D1 recruit CHRVA kids generally play at lower tier universities (as in regular court time), only the true top talent in the region see the court at the top tier (and you can probably count on the fingers of one hand how many D1 recruits from this area see regular court time mid/top tier universities). Statistics are available on websites - quite eye opening).