Basketball and football will always receive much more attention because all DCIAA schools have teams (for the most part) and the teams are popular city wide. Soccer is also a bit more popular citywide as well.

Sports like volleyball, softball, baseball, etc that now skew upper income and are dominated by Jackson-Reed don’t get the same attention.

Still doesn’t excuse why volleyball is run so poorly. I know softball also has lots of game day FFs which is frustrating.

I know the JR softball coach will often reach out to the opposing team’s coach to confirm they actually have a team.

Anonymous wrote:I think everyone can complain about their local HS volleyball system and we could see a pattern. Montgomery County is better at scheduling: we rarely had to adapt to last-minute changes. There is no school bus for athletes - the families have to figure out how the players make it to their games. We are still in JV, so I don't know whether the winning team gets medals or trophies. The player who was MVP last year was one of the best (definitely not chosen by lottery).

FCPS is pretty good.

After adding Boys Varsity, they did a good job of making sure all the girl's games (freshman, JV and Varsity) played their home games at home while the boys had to do a bit more moving around. Officials were always on time if not always as perfect as we would like. Busses were sometimes late (I think it was late twice this season). Games frequently started late because the previous games run long because they scheduled the games to last just barely enough time if one team shuts out the other.

I think everyone can complain about their local HS volleyball system and we could see a pattern. Montgomery County is better at scheduling: we rarely had to adapt to last-minute changes. There is no school bus for athletes - the families have to figure out how the players make it to their games. We are still in JV, so I don't know whether the winning team gets medals or trophies. The player who was MVP last year was one of the best (definitely not chosen by lottery).

This sounds like an awful situation. I’m sorry for those athletes! (And parents)

Our public high school (VA) played J-R this year.

This is a bit of a niche rant, but I feel the need to vent somewhere. For those who don’t know, DCIAA (District of Columbia Interscholastic Athletic Association) is the conference for regular DC public school athletic teams. Private schools and charter schools are part of other conferences like ISL, WCAC, and the PCSAA (Public Charter School Athletic Association). Public, private, and charter schools will play each other in non-conference games throughout the season and for many sports, there is a DC “state” championship under the DCSAA (District of Columbia State Athletic Association) that includes public, private, and charter schools and crowns an overall DC champion.

Volleyball is a sport like soccer or baseball in which most of the highest level competition comes outside of high school teams. Volleyball tends to be a sport for UMC girls whose families have the resources for them to play club volleyball.. As such, the private schools tend to have better volleyball teams than DC public schools. The one exception to this is Jackson-Reed who tends to be among the overall stronger teams in DC, although GDS and SJC are usually a little better. School Without Walls has historically been the second best DCIAA team, and it’s seeming like in a few years MacArthur could be a contender as well, but most of the remaining teams aren’t very competitive with these top teams. There are however many competitive matches between the teams outside the top few. Regardless of whether they can beat GDS, SJC or Jackson-Reed, all of these girls still put in a lot of work at practice and take pride in competing and representing their schools.

My complaints are with the way in which the DCIAA handles most aspects of the volleyball season. It’s my understanding that the job of a conference is to facilitate league play through scheduling, managing transportation, and providing officials for the matches. Additionally, DCIAA provides athletic trainers, arranges the championship tournament, and manages the selection of all DCIAA teams and awards.

At least for volleyball, DCIAA does a terrible job at almost all of these. On the schedule, match locations are constantly changing, sometimes the day of the match. There are frequent forfeits with seemingly no consequence to the team forfeiting other than an L on their record. On the transportation side, buses are frequently late to pick up a team or don’t show up at all or don’t even know the correct destination, because it changed since the bus was booked and some matches end up starting more than an hour past their scheduled time. DCIAA doesn’t provide transportation (or any other support) for JV volleyball teams, so schools with a JV team have to have team parents drive the kids to away games. The officials for DCIAA are laughably terrible. More than half of them don’t seem to have an understanding of the game beyond the absolute basics that you learn in high school PE class - they use the wrong signals, miss obvious calls, and allow egregious violations of more nuanced rules. Selection of the all-DCIAA teams and player of the year seems to be some sort of hybrid between wanting to give out participation awards and a lottery system. In some instances the players chosen are not even the best performing players from their school, much less the conference. The DCIAA volleyball championship was last night and they didn’t even have medals for the players - just a trophy for the winning team. Looking at Instagram, medals are given to players who win other DCIAA championships, including the DCIAA soccer champions the night before, so why not volleyball? Another notable thing scrolling through the DCIAA instagram account is there are probably 10 posts featuring football or basketball to every 1 post featuring another sport. Not sure if volleyball gets less respect because it’s only a girls sport in DC, but you’d think that these supposed experts in HS athletics would recognize that volleyball is exploding in popularity nationwide and do a little more to support these athletes.

While in some respects, high school sports are just another extracurricular activity and for volleyball at least, means almost nothing for getting recruited to play in college, I think the lack of care and competence that the DCIAA puts into girls’ volleyball is a disgrace. It’s disrespectful to the student athletes who put their time and energy into these teams and DCIAA needs to do better.