It's about to be club volleyball season again, so last night Kate and I went to her club's gym for Day 2 of tryouts. It was not one bit fun.
(Well, I was happy to see mom-friends from last season, but the mood of the room was pretty fraught.)
Our club, for whatever reason, conducts tryouts "from the top down." I don't know if all the volleyball clubs do it this way. On Day 1, this means they begin forming their #1 team, a team at the "national" level that will travel to multiple tournaments outside our immediate geographic area. Kate and I prefer a "regional" team, which plays most of its tournaments in the Atlanta metro, but does travel out of town for one tournament (driving distance). And you can indicate, up front, which types of teams you are trying out for (there's also a "local" level which is exclusively in-town tournaments).
Of course the very most ambitious girls usually want to be on a national team. Kate wants to, too, but for budget and time reasons, that's out of reach for us. I can't justify spending for plane tickets or gasoline, and hotels, 8 or 9 weekends of the spring, plus a final trip to Orlando in the summer. And I can't just take off work whenever I want to on a Friday to go to these tournaments. So we chose "regional" on the sign-up form. It's still stupid expensive at that level, but at least manageably so.
Naturally then, she didn't get picked for the #1 or #2 teams which are national. On Day 2 they started building the #3 regional team. All the girls rotate around the courts and gyms, playing non-stop while the various coaches stand on the sidelines with clipboards and iPads, making notes. One by one, girls get called over by coaches, and there they receive their offer to be part of a team.
It's brutal. For many reasons. Number one, and my mind has been trying to formulate this thought all weekend, is that we PAY to tryout -- so we pay for the privilege of hoping that we'll get offered the chance to... pay them more money as a member of a team. Highway robbery, no?
More important than that, though, is that as your daughter is playing her heart out, trying to show off her very best skills, she's seeing her friends and teammates get called over, while she maybe doesn't. If she's not called early in the day, then she knows she isn't being chosen for the higher level teams, which is discouraging. The later it gets, the worse she feels. And yet she has to keep playing her best.
Anyway, Kate was the very last of her friends to be pulled last night, with about 20 minutes left of the tryout. She was offered a spot on the #5 team, which to her, means she isn't very talented at all. (I argue this point -- the #3, #4, #5, and #6 teams are all "regional," and so I see them as all the SAME level, but Kate does not.) She isn't on the same team as many of her friends from last year (most of whom got offers for the #4 team). So to her, it was a failure. AND YET, as I keep trying to gently point out to her -- some girls in that gym played until the very end and got NO offer.
Is this the most heartless of systems, or is it just my momma heart that can't take it?
I hope that in a few weeks the pain of the tryout will blow over and she will be making new friends on her new team, and they will play well together. Sports, man. They're not for the weak.
4 comments:
That sounds unnecessarily tough on the kids. Why not watch all the interested kids and then make decisions about national teams; watch then make decisions about all the regional teams; and then place the remainder on local teams distributing talent as evenly as possible. I'm also struck by how large the number of kids participating must be for clubs to be able to sustain this.
I hope Kate enjoys her season despite the disappointing start.
Sheesh. That sounds brutal. Poor kiddo. It would be SO hard to keep playing your best while you feel worse and worse about your skills/chances! Very glad that she made a team, and yes -- I bet in a few weeks this will just be a sore memory rather than the raw wound it is today.
I have since learned that another club in town does tryouts the RIGHT way; i.e., they post the results on their website, AFTER the day of tryouts has ended.
Wondering if I have enough guts to send an email to the leadership about this issue...
I'm 100 percent with Shannon. And I THINK I would send an email. It's the right thing to do, and you will word it with such understanding and tact. I realize that we aren't dealing with world hunger here, but you know, we're trying to raise good people, and surely that's not the way a good world works.
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