Volleyball Q&A

Episode 1: Beginning at the End - My Daughter Told Me She's Done Playing

• VBQA • Season 1 • Episode 1

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"I'm Done." What happens when things come to an end? What do you do when your child opts out of pursuing college volleyball. We take a look at the competitive college volleyball landscape what are realistic expectations of the prep volleyball journey and how beginning at the end can completely change our perspective.

Mentioned in this Episode:
Marie Zidek, DePaul University Head Coach - @mariezidek
Jason Bibler - PRI Recruiting - @jaytap2000

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Episode 1

Host: [00:00:00] To the Volleyball Q& A podcast, where we dive into Facebook, social, and online forums and take your direct questions to try to tackle the crazy journey is Prep Volleyball. Hey, thanks for joining me on this first episode. First episodes are pretty tough to come up with because you're trying to figure out something that's entertaining to talk about, but also a hook or to talk about the philosophy of why you're doing something.

And I racked my brain quite a bit on trying to figure out where to go with this first episode and what to do. And I ran across a question on a Facebook group that I thought was really interesting as a place to start for this podcast because there's a philosophy that you're going to hear a lot of times over and over and over again as we go through things that helps determine how you answer a lot of the questions that you're in.

Instead of wasting a bunch of time, I'd like to go ahead and just jump straight into the first question. And through the power of AI, we're going to have a dramatic reading [00:01:00] of this first question. 

Mom: My heart is broken today. My junior came in my room last night and told me she appreciated everything we have done for her, but she no longer wants to try to play in college.

It took everything for me to not break down in tears and just be calm and steady. I don't know what to do. I want her to choose her own path for sure, however not regret this choice or be making it based on emotion. I'm confident there are others who have stood by their daughters over the many, many years.

And definitely well over 100, 000 in financing this dream to just basically feel like you're hitting a brick wall. How do you handle it? 

Host: Man, what a question. That is so tough when you've put in so much time and effort and emotional resources and financial resources to something like this. And you've really meandered to this journey and it is not easy to get through.

Dealing with this is a really, really challenging thing. I want [00:02:00] to take a step back on this and say that one of the hardest things about a journey is if you don't really have a destination in mind or where you're headed, it can be really challenging to get there and you don't really know if you're there or not.

To answer this question, you have to take a step back and look globally at what you've been through in terms of their career, and also where they're headed as a human being, and you as a parent as well. So I want to examine that entire journey. And offer maybe a perspective to take a look at it to see how do you evaluate, where do you move on from this, how does it work, and how do you determine if it was worth it, if it was rewarding, if it did what you wanted to do.

That's the big question. Starting with the notion of getting to and playing in college. You need to have an understanding that that is incredibly difficult. For you [00:03:00] guys that are on the back end of it, everybody can attest to that there have been some really high highs and some really low lows throughout the process, but it is a really difficult journey to get through.

And then playing in college is hard too, for a lot of reasons. I want to talk about just the sheer numbers of people and how they dwindle over time. So you can have some perspective when you start this journey at 10, 11, 12 years old, and you're looking at 18s and somewhere along the way, a lot of kids are going to say, this is my passion.

I love this. This is what I want to do. And we, as parents jump straight in and embrace that. And we want that for them so much. Having conversations with them throughout the process and having conversations with each other, whether you're a single parent, co parenting, married, whatever it is, it's so important to always be having conversations about these things and understanding realistically from an [00:04:00] expectation standpoint, what are we looking for and what do we think will happen.

 I found some 2020 stats from the NCAA research the numbers don't matter so much. There's a point I'm trying to demonstrate here. There's probably a different set of stats out there from seven different websites that talk about this. But I want to talk about where things start and where they end up.

In terms of all ages, right now, in the United States, we have more than half a million players playing volleyball. volleyball. It's a ton of kids playing and it is growing exponentially every single year. In high school that number is about 452, 000. So there's a little bit of drop off or a little bit of taper between the beginnings in elementary or middle school and getting to high school.

From high school to college, there's a pretty significant drop off. lop off at college. Only 3. 9 [00:05:00] percent of players that played in high school make it to any college level. And there's a myriad of reasons of why that occurs, but realize that 96 of the a hundred kids that are playing in high school right now are not going to be playing in college at any level.

If you want to narrow it down even further, Only 1. 2 percent of high school players play at the Division 1 level. There's a finite number of colleges. There's a finite number of spots on those. It can ebb and flow a little bit because some people will increase or decrease their rosters here and there.

But realize that you have a tremendous number of kids that are coming into the system and playing prep volleyball. And as you get to college, there's a fixed number. So the competition for those spots continues to get more and more fierce year over year. [00:06:00] Now when we talk about power four, that number continues to decrease.

And if you want to even think about professionally, now this does not take into account any of the U. S. leagues that are starting to form, and we need to see what those look like down the road. So all I'm talking about right now is what's traditionally been international professional play. Between men and women, not just women, men and women, there's a total of 450 about right now playing professionally overseas.

Now that number obviously will go up with some of the, like I said, professional leagues that are in the United States. But you need to think about the funnel that we started with over half a million players. And if you want to see them go all the way through to a professional career, we're talking about 450.

And the point of that is very few people make it all the way through and every single one of them is going to end up hitting a place where they're no longer playing. Everybody, [00:07:00] even if you end up playing professionally, there's going to be a point where you hit the wall and you're not playing anymore.

For every single person, there's going to be a point where they cross the finish line and they no longer are playing the sport. They may still be involved coaching or something along those lines, but the numbers really and truly show that there's a super wide mouth of this funnel and it gets really narrow at the bottom.

To really visualize what we're talking about, think about at the division one level. So on an annual basis, realistically, most division one schools have about three scholarships available each year. And you're competing against kids in your grade level to be recruited for one of those three, but you're also recruit, but you're also competing with kids in a four to five year range around you that are older, that are in the transfer portal, that are looking for other homes three.

That's what we're talking about. So when you pick your [00:08:00] school. that you are so interested in or you're so hell bent on, you need to remember that of all the kids that are sending emails, anywhere between a hundred and a thousand a day, there are three new players, thereabouts, three to five, that are going to walk in the door on a team and start playing that next year.

It's incredibly competitive. That's not to say to stop trying by any stretch, but I just want you to understand that when my daughter started playing and we got into it. And she found the passion for the game. One of the things we consistently talked about was the difficulty of the journey in realistic expectations year over year over year.

Realistically, where is your career going? What is it going to look like? Where is it going to end? And so we could have real thoughts and didn't let the train get out in front of us too far, or our [00:09:00] expectations get too out of whack in terms of when we were talking about things and kept things in perspective year over year and treated each year as a good year.

a bit of a found blessing every single time because we knew we got to move on to something else. And that funnel was getting smaller every single year. And not everyone was getting to do that again for so many different reasons, financial reasons, injury reasons, mental health reasons, social things that get in the way.

There's so many things that are competing for time and just restrict resources that allow you to continue on that path. So getting to an elite level is really tough. Maria Zydek, who's the head coach at DePaul University, who I think is absolutely just a rocket ship of positive energy for what's going on at the collegiate level, has a great voice.

And if you don't follow her on Twitter, she's a great follower. in terms of talking about what they do, but also giving little bits [00:10:00] of advice and really great perspective. And she also asks questions and listens. She had a tweet recently where she said, recruits as a D one head coach, the most demanding resources, my time, my current team needs the most of my time.

If I'm spending time to jump on a phone call with you, this is a big deal. There are 900, 000 plus U18 girls playing volleyball in the USA. There are 4, 000 NCAA D1 spots. There are 12 on my team. That's just the perspective of there's a lot playing. And again, it funnels down really tremendously. Jason Bibler, who's also a recruiting consultant.

Who I think does a really great job of providing balanced perspective on what's going on out there and has a lot of conversations with coaches very actively had a tweet on the 26th of February where he said, everyone wants to play in the power five. Sure, but keep in mind that 1. 2 percent of high school volleyball athletes [00:11:00] play D1 volleyball.

That means 0. 23 percent of high school volleyball athletes are playing in the P5. And if you want to follow Jason, he's at J TAP 2000. He's a great follow. I say all that to say If you walk in to volleyball and you never stopped down and have a plan and you're just on the boat for the ride and you don't know where you're ending, there's no way to evaluate was this good?

How do I deal with this? And did this accomplish what we wanted? But understanding part of the perspective is the stats are we're not going to make it. I felt that way about my daughter all the way through. We're not going to make it. I don't know how we're going to make it one year to the next to the next.

And so we would have those conversations to go, there's maybe this place for you at division two or division three, which that's not a slap in the face to them at all. Cause I've seen some incredibly high level play at the division two and division three levels. If you want to continue to play, maybe you can play club down the road.

 Every single year, like I said, was a [00:12:00] blessing on that journey towards something that's different. I want to provide you a little bit different perspective . As you take a look at your child's life all the way through, we're talking about a portion of their life that usually can begin anywhere between eight years old, 10 years old, 11 years old.

It seems like he keeps getting younger and younger and ends somewhere around 20 to 25 years old. That's a very average range of a volleyball career, with the outliers being professionals or lifetime Olympians, and those are like 1 in 12, 1 in 20, 1 in 450, really small numbers. The average lifespan of a female in the United States is a little under 80 years.

And your daughter's career is very likely to be over from the time they're 20 to 25 years old. That means that of their life, they still have 50 to 60 years worth of life left to live. On the front end for them and for you guys, when you're experiencing that with them through [00:13:00] these prep years, It's a significant percentage of the interactions in life that you have with them.

Anywhere between 12 and 20, whatever, that can be the main topic of conversation that you have between your daughter as you're working through their career. For them, a lot of times, it's somewhere around 75 to 80 percent of their sort of cognizant life is this conversation.

pursuit of this sport. And when you're all in on that, and that's everything that you have, it feels consuming in terms of who they are, what they are and the nature of your relationship and in what they're supposed to be. But also think about the fact that by the time they're done, they have 60 years of their life left.

That's a significantly larger chunk of their life that they will not. Most likely be playing volleyball than the duration that they did play volleyball. Volleyball is [00:14:00] highly influential on the front end. And I am a huge proponent of kids playing sports because I believe that it teaches a lot of fantastic. Lessons, and it provides some things in the world now that they don't get other places, but you need to understand that the impact that your child is most likely going to make on the world is not going to be on the volleyball court. And you as their parent are working towards trying to make them the most complete adult That can make a positive impact on the world that they possibly can and we me included get really caught up on this front end because it's everything to us in terms of our time resources and emotion and we don't look well at that last two thirds of their life that we really need to be focused on because it's the bulk of what they're going to do.

So when you take a longitudinal view of their life and you look at [00:15:00] what you want out of volleyball. You need to be asking the question as it relates to their whole life, not just their volleyball career think about this if you're going on a vacation and you're planning out a driving trip of some kind with your family, with an end goal of where you're going to go and what you want to do along the way.

There's never a vacation that's successful where you just get in the car and go. And just drive. And at some point in the middle, you decide to turn left. Another time you decided to turn right. Maybe you decide to go straight for a couple of hours. You look back after three to four hours and figure out if you are on the right path or not.

And there's no way you can know because you don't know where you're headed. When you look at what the volleyball journey is for you guys, as a family and for your player, you need to have a real conversation about. What do we want from volleyball [00:16:00] in relation to parenting my child for the duration of their life?

What lessons do I want them to learn? What situations do I want them to be in? Those things can influence when you get to the end of this to say, Was this successful or was this not successful? And maybe somewhere along the way, your kid becomes a phenom and is killing it. It's still incredibly important for you to maintain some level of balance, even though they're fantastic at the game and they're going to go on and play in college, maybe even professionally.

There's a point it's going to be over and they need to be able to take the lessons that they learned into the remainder of their professional life and personal life after the fact. I can tell you personally, That when we started the journey, there were things that I wanted my daughter to learn as it relates to sports because they were things I learned when I played sports and I found them to be invaluable and hugely [00:17:00] influential in my life.

There are few places left in life where immediate consequences for your actions, good and bad, are reflected right there in the moment. You succeed or fail, right? You have a good play. You're successful, you get positive feedback, you fail, you can't hide from it, there's people that can't pad you from it.

You have to find a way to actually deal with those real consequences and a lot of times in our lives, those opportunities are becoming less and less right now. And I wanted my daughter to be able to understand what it felt like when something didn't go right. How do you deal with it? How do you pick yourself up?

How do you move on? And how do you fix it? How do you not compound it? And if something goes right, what does that feel like? And have real genuine feedback around doing something right or wrong. Personal responsibility is a big thing in our house. And that is one thing that I really wanted to impart to her.

And in a game, [00:18:00] where you are part of a team, and you have to perform in order for the team to do well, You have to take personal responsibility in your preparation and your actual performance. And then you have to learn how to deal with disappointments and successes as you move forward in a real way.

Volleyball is a people business. Your kids are going to have to deal with imperfect people, including you and I, they have to learn how to deal with imperfect coaches. They have to deal with imperfect teammates and that's great preparation for them and their jobs down the road.

You have to learn to deal with things out of your control. If your coach likes you or not is not always in your control. How much playing time you get isn't in your control. How you deal with the factors that you can control your reactions and your emotions is huge. There are so many great lessons from sports

so it's really important when you are evaluating or thinking about what your kid's volleyball journey looks like, You [00:19:00] need to begin with the end in mind. That's the key lesson. Begin with the end in mind and then be intentional each and every step of the way in the journey. If you've set a goal for what you think a successful sports career looks like, And you can go through each different step.

It gives you a real barometer or measuring stick that you can look at when you're making your decisions of, should I go to this club or this club? What do I want my kid to learn? What do I do in this situation when they're having trouble with a coach or a teammate? How do you want them to process that?

Is it relates to. Their life after volleyball. How did I deal with what's fair and what's not fair? There's so much of this that's a crap shoot, but that's what life is too, is it's a crap shoot. And then bigger than that, there's so many interpersonal things that you have to learn to deal with about who are positive people that helped me to get better, who are not. How do I make space for these people? What do [00:20:00] boundaries look like? I can't even begin to overemphasize how important so many of those lessons are that are for life afterwards. But if you're thinking about the end, when you're going through those processes, it makes it much easier for you to determine what are we supposed to do here?

There are so many times that we got introduced or caught up in volleyball because as kids, our friends wanted to do a Y team and then they started playing and then your kid was pretty good or their friends all wanted to play and they all went and signed up for club and they're all at the same club and they're all playing and then things start to happen.

Between 13 and 15, there's a set of issues that happens and then they escalate from 16 to 18. 13 to 15 is largely, unfair playing time, my coach doesn't like my daughter, lots of things like that. And when you get older, you can't even begin to imagine what some of those things escalate to.

And I'm not trying to [00:21:00] scare you, but you need to understand that they are. don't get easier. They get harder and they get bigger. I heard somebody describe one time kids that are younger as a bomb that goes off. And as they get older, the bomb goes off less, but the blast radius is bigger. And that's a pretty good analogy for what we're talking about here.

What I'm saying is, begin with the end in mind and be intentional about every single step of what you do when you're walking through this journey with your kids and you need to communicate it regularly with everyone involved in this decision making process so you guys can clearly delineate what that looks like for you collectively and each of you individually be on the same page.

It's not going to solve everything. Because it is going to be really hard to stick to this. Sometimes you're going to make divergent decisions, and you'll find it's going to bite you on the butt, and you'll know immediately to look back and say, Man, we went off plan. We went off mission. We went off from what we agreed to, and it didn't work.

And it [00:22:00] happens. But the great thing is that you do have a plan that you can come back to, and a destination that you're headed to, and you can continue to learn those lessons along the way. The key is just to remember that for over 99 percent of players right now, You're preparing them for the 50 plus years of life after their career is over, where they will make their impact on the world, not on a volleyball court.

When they choose to step away, or they're eventually finished, what was your objective, and was it met? Maybe it happened earlier than you wanted? But when your perspective is based on growth, it makes the disappointment less when you take into account all the skills they learned during their career, no matter the duration.