Anonymous wrote:
Not just locally, but nationally, many people (including some college coaches) feel that the US club volleyball system has gotten out of control. Too many practices, too many travel tournaments, too much emotional stress and load on growing humans bodies.

Further, the CHRVA arms race to compete in open and pack in as many qualifiers as possible is just bizarre. Only a small (and shrinking) fraction of players in this area will see any ROI from that strategy.

Threads like this make me a bit hopeful that parents are starting to realize that it’s time to wake up, demand balance, and claw back our children’s (and family) lives.

Hugh school season, then a club season with 2 practices per week, 1-2 qualifiers and a few 1 day local tournaments + AAU Nationals at 16 and 17 really should be enough for any player who is not going to commit D1.

I keep beating these drums for two years now, hoping that the clubs would hear. I think that MVSA has a great model here: their top team at each age level travels more, while the other teams play mostly in regional tournaments. A regional MVSA team would be a dream scenario for most volleyball players who only play for fun and don't plan to get recruited. They are competitive and fun. Unfortunately, this dream will not become reality for most players because MVSA has a limited number of spots on their rosters. The alternative for most players is to pay 2-3x more for worse clubs (which are rarely competitive against MVSA regional teams). Most top teams in other clubs travel for the sake of travelling: instead of losing in regional tournaments, they spend weekends in hotels to lose far away from home. If you want to avoid all the non-sense travel, you pick a bottom level team in one of those clubs and play at slightly advanced rec level. It is a sad reality and I agree that something in between rec and club would be awesome.

Anonymous wrote:

Hugh school season, then a club season with 2 practices per week, 1-2 qualifiers and a few 1 day local tournaments + AAU Nationals at 16 and 17 really should be enough for any player who is not going to commit D1.

For college recruiting focused club players who want to play D3 or above, that schedule doesn’t work very well. Practice time is really important, and unfortunately to be seen by enough coaches you often have to travel more.

For non-college focused players, I agree. Fortunately there are still a number of clubs up to U16 that have that type of schedule. Once you get to U17&U18, a significant number of players still playing are going after college recruiting opportunities.

This is an old debate in other sports, especially the basketball, baseball and football. College coaches often complain about players being over-focused on a single sport, playing too much and coming into college with injury concerns. However, none of them stop recruiting those players, so it’s become mandatory to play those sports year-round for most athletes. AAU basketball started the trend, quickly followed by baseball (both Little League and then American Legion, etc). It’s been more than 30 years without any change in those sports.

It would be great if there were an option between rec volleyball and club volleyball, but it would take county and city rec organizations focusing on volleyball leagues to create it, along with some national organization setting up the right structures. The difference between volleyball and basketball/baseball is that those sports started from the grass roots (rec) and built up to club, with lots of options in between.

Volleyball in CHRVA is building from the top down, and there just aren’t many good options to play outside of club. Other regions have a much better infrastructure, but CHRVA and the local sports organizations make zero investment of time or money in developing those options.