Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thanks for the thoughtful detailed reply and info. You have been around the block. Appreciate you creating this thread and keeping it up.

If a player is on a (desired) path to play in college, what do you think are the keys to success starting at u15? Club selection, workouts, privates, etc. What does that schedule and life look like for that athlete?

My DD is about to start her freshman year of D1 volleyball so the recruiting process was not so long ago for us so here is some of what we learned.

Becoming the best player possible is a good place to start, so all the things you mention are considerations. Picking the right club, starting strength and conditioning training, taking some private lessons, are good ideas. Fitting all this in can be hard though. If your DD is going to be a U15 next club season, I assume that's she's going to be a HS freshman? If she is going to be playing HS volleyball, and particularly if she makes varsity at her school, it's a pretty big time commitment and can make fitting in extra training hard. Most HS teams practice or have matches every school day and often some matches or other stuff on weekends. If you are shopping around for a club, you should also be attending fall clinics at the clubs you're considering. At more competitive clubs, the fall clinics are where they are getting to know players and deciding who to take for next season - the tryouts themselves are largely a formality. So HS volleyball obligations most school days and clinics on weekends pretty much mean volleyball 7-days a week for the fall. We tried to fit in some strength and conditioning sessions for my DD during HS season but it seemed like a lot, and we ended up stopping.

In terms of clubs, there are local clubs that have a reputation for producing high quality players and so being on a team at one of these clubs can be a bit of a head start, but it's by no means required. Plenty of D1 players didn't come from top level clubs. You do want to look for a club that attends at least a few bigger tournaments (like qualifiers, AAU Nationals, the bigger JVA tournaments) since these are the most efficient way for college coaches to get to watch a lot of players in a single weekend. One caveat here is that if your DD is a libero/defensive specialist, playing on a higher level club that competes in higher level divisions can be useful. Unlike a hitter who a college coach can see how tall they are or how high they jump regardless of the level of competition, it's tougher to evaluate whether a libero can handle tough serves or play good defense against elite hitters if they are playing weaker competition.

Even for colleges that aren't super selective academically, academics are still a real consideration for college coaches. They are looking for players that can handle the demands of being a student athlete and if a potential recruit is struggling in high school, that can hurt their chances of getting an offer even if they are a really talented player.

Finally, start working on a plan for reaching out to college coaches. For all but the most elite players, it's up to the player to make contact with college coaches. When you see college coaches walking around big tournaments they are not just strolling around waiting for a player to catch their eye. They have a list of players they are there to see and go to watch them play and make evaluations and take notes. From a player's perspective, they need to have a plan for getting on coaches' radar. This means putting together highlight videos, coming up with lists of programs your DD is interested in, and then contacting coaches.

Depending on the players age/grade, the type of communication will be different. Prior to June 15 of their sophomore year of HS, college coaches are not allowed to directly communicate with prospective players. They can come watch players at tournaments, invite players to camps, and speak to coaches/club directors about the players. So at 15s and 16s, players should be reaching out to coaches introducing themselves, giving links to video and then inviting them to come watch them play at a tournaments, but understand that the response from coaches will be pretty minimal during this time. A common strategy is to send out introductory messages early in the season and then a shorter message ahead of tournaments letting the coach know the playing schedule for the first day. Important things to know about college coaches coming to watch at tournaments are they don't care at all if your DD's team wins or loses, they aren't particularly worried about mistakes or even if your DD isn't a starter. They will notice things like how a player interacts with their teammates and coaches, how seriously they take warmups, their level of effort on tough balls, are they loud and communicating, their demeanor and attentiveness on the bench, and how they respond when they make an error.

After June 15 of sophomore year, coaches can communicate directly with players, although there is a somewhat complicated calendar that dictates exactly what type of contact coaches are allowed at various times of year https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/compliance/recruiting/calendar/2025-26/2025-26D1Rec_WVBRecruitingCalendar.pdf. Once your DD is old enough for coaches to directly communicate, they might get invitations from college coaches to have phone or video chat conversations. This is an opportunity for the players and coaches to get to know each other a little bit. It's really important for your DD to take these seriously - be on time, do research about the school and the volleyball program (know what conference they are in and other basic information), have questions prepared, etc. I understand that this sort of thing is new for most of our DDs, but it's part of the process and they will get better at it the more calls they take. With that in mind, our strategy was to take a call with nearly every coach who expressed some kind of interest. Even if it's a school/program you don't think your DD would ever be interested in going to, at a minimum it is good practice and you never know if a player and coach might hit it off. Also, unless the coach specifically asks for a parent to sit in, it's usually best to let the player take these calls solo.

As they get further into the process, they might get invited for an official visit. D1 programs will invite (and pay for) the player and parents to come to campus. This is the "interview" for both players/parents and the program. Most coaches will have several meals with the family, arrange for the player to meet and spend time with the team/staff, tour the facilities, meet academic advisors/strength coaches, and do some of the more normal college tours and academic stuff. Generally, if a player is invited on an official visit, the program is seriously considering making an offer to the player so they will really try and sell the school/program.

The only platform we used was UniversityAthlete which is pretty cheap at $49 per year and seems to be the one the majority of college coaches use. It allows you to set up a profile and do some basic research on various college programs. It also allows you to see what colleges are going to be recruiting at which tournaments. After big tournaments, you can see how many evaluations were done of your player and what conference the school was in, although not the specific school. We decided against using a recruiting service and had zero regrets.

We went to a few showcases from 14s-16s but generally didn't find these to be useful as they didn't really result in any meaningful contacts from college coaches. Also, my DD never ranked particularly high on PrepDig lists, nor did she get invited to Under Armour or other similar events. While these sorts of things can be something to put on a player's "resume", I don't think college coaches put much weight in them. They are looking at how an individual player will fit on their team and don't really care whether a particular player is the 43rd or 87th ranked player in Virginia.

Another thing we did over the years was try to get to as many local college volleyball matches as possible. In the DMV, we are fortunate to have lots of schools with volleyball programs nearby: Maryland, Towson, GW, American U, UMBC, Georgetown, George Mason, and many more. Even if your DD isn't interested in any of these schools, seeing what the level of volleyball is like in different conferences can be really enlightening and useful in deciding what schools to contact. While there is great volleyball being played in every conference, understanding what volleyball is like in the Big Ten versus Patriot League, Atlantic 10, Big East, CAA, etc is important. It's also a lot of fun to go to college matches.

There is tons of information online and on social media that can be helpful. These are some of the folks I think provide the most useful information:
https://www.instagram.com/howtogetrecruited/
https://www.instagram.com/recruiting_class/
https://www.instagram.com/numberonevolleyball/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP who posted the data on U15 club for 2025 commits -- that was an awesome perspective -- thx for sharing! I just cut and pasted that and sent it to my kid.

The PrepDig Rankings Archive is an imperfect list, but that may also be a useful source of volleyball commit data for this region by club. Here's what I found from what was readily accessible on their site. Data is for the classes of 2023 - 2026. The 2027 cycle has just begun (N=12 currently), but the 2026 class is likely 80% or so complete. This is a super quick and dirty analysis sorting clubs by those that commit the top 6 players or more, less than 6, and less than 3 in a given year. Top line: it does look like the regional commit numbers may have peaked in 2025 and started falling quite noticeably in 2026. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

PP here. Thanks for this hard work, very helpful! I wonder if we can get an actual CHRVA recruits list going somewhere so we don't have to do all this work.

I used the Prep Dig info as well, and agree with you that its imperfect but useful. Kudos to Bob et al. for the work they do to watch so many players every year. That said, there are some limitations that can skew the data.

I do agree with your view that we may have fewer commits for the 2026 class than we did for 2025. A couple of factors are driving this. The biggest is that 5th year/post-grad players who had COVID waivers or COVID/Redshirt waivers finally finished their careers, opening up more spots than usual on rosters. Additionally, this is the first year the House settlement allows more scholarships, even as it capped roster sizes. This made getting a scholarship viable for more players and seems to have driven at least some additional commits who might have chosen not to play if they didn't get funding. Finally, the class of 2025 seemed to be deeper than most classes. You could see it happening back in U14/U15 years. The competition level suddenly took a significant jump up versus the previous year.

But the future may not be as bright. The elimination of the mandatory redshirt after transfers has made adding talent through the transfer portal important for D1. If you were a coach, would you offer a player a spot on your roster if you knew she needed a year or two to develop? Or would you hit the transfer portal and pick up a player that already has a year or two of college volleyball under their belt with proven results?

You can check out the 2024 transfer portal stats for women's volleyball at: https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2022/4/25/transfer-portal-data-division-i-student-athlete-transfer-trends.aspx


Prep Dig Issues
1) They only have a Virginia list, which includes some of the MD/DC players but doesn't have any of the DE/WV or most of the Eastern MD Players.
2) The VA list includes a number of non-CHRVA clubs and players (like 540, 757, Richmond-RVC, RVJ).
3) It only list the players Bob has ranked, and in the 2025 class there are at least a dozen including some D1 commits that aren't on the list at all.
4) Players have to update both their club info and their college commit themselves. There's at least another dozen commits that haven't put their commit school in, and may even be a couple who committed to a D2 or D3 school their junior year but changed their mind and chose not to play. And there are easily 12+ incorrect club assignments for committed players.
5) The list gets built starting in U15 years, and it tends to skew towards clubs that have a least one player in the top 20 and/or the best high school teams. They then had a chance to watch everyone else on the team. That's why you see so many uncommitted players in the top 50 -- they were added and mostly ranked in U15/U16. Most of the others are added as part of their showcases.

3,4,5 combine to skew the overall list some. It gets the obvious ones right (Metro, Paramount, VAE, VA Jrs), but tends to miss on at lot of the clubs with good players who tend to commit later in their club careers.

For example: Columbia has 7 recruits for 2025, only 2 are listed, 1 is wrong
LEVBC has 6 commits, only 4 are listed.
MOCO has 3 commits, none are listed.
MOJO has 3 commits, only 1 is listed
SRVC shows 2 commits, but one of them graduated in 2024. Plus 2 not listed.

A lot of these types of issues on are the 2024 and 2023 list as well.

If travel and money were no object what would be your club of choice starting that u15 year - after metro and paramount?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP who posted the data on U15 club for 2025 commits -- that was an awesome perspective -- thx for sharing! I just cut and pasted that and sent it to my kid.

The PrepDig Rankings Archive is an imperfect list, but that may also be a useful source of volleyball commit data for this region by club. Here's what I found from what was readily accessible on their site. Data is for the classes of 2023 - 2026. The 2027 cycle has just begun (N=12 currently), but the 2026 class is likely 80% or so complete. This is a super quick and dirty analysis sorting clubs by those that commit the top 6 players or more, less than 6, and less than 3 in a given year. Top line: it does look like the regional commit numbers may have peaked in 2025 and started falling quite noticeably in 2026. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

PP here. Thanks for this hard work, very helpful! I wonder if we can get an actual CHRVA recruits list going somewhere so we don't have to do all this work.

I used the Prep Dig info as well, and agree with you that its imperfect but useful. Kudos to Bob et al. for the work they do to watch so many players every year. That said, there are some limitations that can skew the data.

I do agree with your view that we may have fewer commits for the 2026 class than we did for 2025. A couple of factors are driving this. The biggest is that 5th year/post-grad players who had COVID waivers or COVID/Redshirt waivers finally finished their careers, opening up more spots than usual on rosters. Additionally, this is the first year the House settlement allows more scholarships, even as it capped roster sizes. This made getting a scholarship viable for more players and seems to have driven at least some additional commits who might have chosen not to play if they didn't get funding. Finally, the class of 2025 seemed to be deeper than most classes. You could see it happening back in U14/U15 years. The competition level suddenly took a significant jump up versus the previous year.

But the future may not be as bright. The elimination of the mandatory redshirt after transfers has made adding talent through the transfer portal important for D1. If you were a coach, would you offer a player a spot on your roster if you knew she needed a year or two to develop? Or would you hit the transfer portal and pick up a player that already has a year or two of college volleyball under their belt with proven results?

You can check out the 2024 transfer portal stats for women's volleyball at: https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2022/4/25/transfer-portal-data-division-i-student-athlete-transfer-trends.aspx


Prep Dig Issues
1) They only have a Virginia list, which includes some of the MD/DC players but doesn't have any of the DE/WV or most of the Eastern MD Players.
2) The VA list includes a number of non-CHRVA clubs and players (like 540, 757, Richmond-RVC, RVJ).
3) It only list the players Bob has ranked, and in the 2025 class there are at least a dozen including some D1 commits that aren't on the list at all.
4) Players have to update both their club info and their college commit themselves. There's at least another dozen commits that haven't put their commit school in, and may even be a couple who committed to a D2 or D3 school their junior year but changed their mind and chose not to play. And there are easily 12+ incorrect club assignments for committed players.
5) The list gets built starting in U15 years, and it tends to skew towards clubs that have a least one player in the top 20 and/or the best high school teams. They then had a chance to watch everyone else on the team. That's why you see so many uncommitted players in the top 50 -- they were added and mostly ranked in U15/U16. Most of the others are added as part of their showcases.

3,4,5 combine to skew the overall list some. It gets the obvious ones right (Metro, Paramount, VAE, VA Jrs), but tends to miss on at lot of the clubs with good players who tend to commit later in their club careers.

For example: Columbia has 7 recruits for 2025, only 2 are listed, 1 is wrong
LEVBC has 6 commits, only 4 are listed.
MOCO has 3 commits, none are listed.
MOJO has 3 commits, only 1 is listed
SRVC shows 2 commits, but one of them graduated in 2024. Plus 2 not listed.

A lot of these types of issues on are the 2024 and 2023 list as well.

Anonymous wrote:PP who posted the data on U15 club for 2025 commits -- that was an awesome perspective -- thx for sharing! I just cut and pasted that and sent it to my kid.

The PrepDig Rankings Archive is an imperfect list, but that may also be a useful source of volleyball commit data for this region by club. Here's what I found from what was readily accessible on their site. Data is for the classes of 2023 - 2026. The 2027 cycle has just begun (N=12 currently), but the 2026 class is likely 80% or so complete. This is a super quick and dirty analysis sorting clubs by those that commit the top 6 players or more, less than 6, and less than 3 in a given year. Top line: it does look like the regional commit numbers may have peaked in 2025 and started falling quite noticeably in 2026. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

Anonymous wrote:
I'd love to see a "club tree" that shows how many players in that 88 came through specific clubs from U12-U15, but my guess is that 5 or 6 of them make up the bulk of that list.

Anonymous wrote:Thanks for the thoughtful detailed reply and info. You have been around the block. Appreciate you creating this thread and keeping it up.

If a player is on a (desired) path to play in college, what do you think are the keys to success starting at u15? Club selection, workouts, privates, etc. What does that schedule and life look like for that athlete?

Anonymous wrote:Thanks for the thoughtful detailed reply and info. You have been around the block. Appreciate you creating this thread and keeping it up.

If a player is on a (desired) path to play in college, what do you think are the keys to success starting at u15? Club selection, workouts, privates, etc. What does that schedule and life look like for that athlete?

Anonymous wrote:What counts as college commitment? Are we counting commitments to local community colleges?