Volleyball Q&A

Episode 3: My Kid Isn't Getting Any Playing Time

• VBQA • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Its every parents worst nightmare. You spend the money and time and now your kid is stuck on the sidelines. This episode dives into some skills that can be developed during these hard times that will benefit you child in the short term, long term and longest term after volleyball.

Mentioned in this Episode:
Jamie Moon - Legere & Moon Volleyball Recruiting - @coachmoonvball /
@legerandmoon
Dan Hurley - UConn Men's Head Basketball Coach - @dhurley15

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Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Volleyball Q and a podcast. We dive into Facebook, social and online forums and take your direct questions to try to tackle the crazy journey that's Prep Volleyball. I'm really excited about today's episode. It happens to be a really emotional topic and a hot topic at that, especially two thirds of the way through the season.

Again, thanks to the advancement that is AI, I'm going to go ahead and just proceed with the question so we can jump right in. So here is a dramatic reading of this week's question. 

Guest: How do parents deal with playing time complaints? I'm not the one complaining, but new family to our club after first tournament, adamant about not paying money to only have their child play for a short amount of time and didn't serve, etc.

I understand where they are coming from, but it's hard to hear it when I think the coaches do a great job. 

Host: This has to be every parent's [00:01:00] worst nightmare in terms of shelling out the dollars that we do, the money, the resources, the time. And then all you end up doing for the season is a United States tour, watching your kid on the sidelines of various different cities at qualifiers.

So what in the world are you supposed to do when your kid is not getting any playing time? I'm going to present five different things that I think are going on here and there are a ton of other options out there or possibilities that could be why this is going on. But these are the ones that I find most and number one actually covers 80 percent of the issue that I've seen on teams that we have been on in the past.

This one is really tough and it takes a lot of introspection. But the big question is. Are you taking responsibility for getting better? In my experience, over the [00:02:00] years, most of those that have issues with playing time really haven't been putting in the effort outside. They expect the club or the coach at this particular year to do everything to get their player ready.

And if that doesn't happen, the knee jerk reaction is to begin a teardown campaign and go after the coach or even players on the team. When there's a player in front of your kid. It's on the floor. We tend to put on parent goggles a lot of times and look at the other kid and find ways to pick apart their game or point out their shortcomings in an effort to try to find a way to justify.

our kid being on the floor. And we spend lots of time trying to figure out why. And we expend a ton of energy trying to sort through what those reasons are. The danger here is that taking that approach [00:03:00] without fail, your kid, other kids on the team, and other parents will hear the words coming out of your mouth.

And one of the most destructive things you can do is to team chemistry is to start planting seeds in your child's mind because they start taking those to practice and then they start parroting those words to other players on the team. That starts divisions. It starts creating factions and it starts turning into an us versus that player, us versus the coach mentality.

There is no easier way to sink a team than to start creating those factions. I can say, In eight or nine years that we were involved in club volleyball, I never was on a team where there wasn't at least one of those parents. There was always one that put on the parent goggles, tried to unjustly validate that their child [00:04:00] should be playing over another.

And put the wishes of themselves over the team. In some years, the culture of the team was strong enough that that player ended up being pushed to the side. In other years, the coach or the culture wasn't strong enough and that faction would actually gain ground and the team would invariably underperform.

Unless you're on an under 14s developmental team, it is not the responsibility of the coach to improve your child's performance. Their job, especially as the teams get older and more competitive, it's to field a team that wins at a national level. So there's going to be times during the season the coaches will focus on skill development, particularly at the beginning of the season, and if your kid improves as a byproduct, that's great.

They'll also improve based on the talent surrounding them on the team that pushes them forward. But as the season progresses and there are two practices a week, [00:05:00] each two hours, there's not enough time to stop down and address individual performance issues with every single player. If your player is stagnant or falling behind, it's not on the coach to keep bringing them up as the season goes on.

It's on you and the player. We're on the player and you to seek out ways to improve through lessons, workouts, or maybe some mental training. We have been in this place before too. We made it a point to never say a word to another parent or the coach in any way whatsoever. Any and all energy that we had, that we wanted to expend towards that.

We pushed it towards something to make her better. So during the course of that season was when a lot of habits were formed and In terms of the importance of workouts and lifting individual lessons to work on skills that were [00:06:00] not as strong as maybe the other player and also mental preparation to be ready to go when her opportunity arose.

in our season when we had the overwhelming group of parents that were so dissatisfied with the playing time of their kid. They spent far more energy angry, bitter, and going after the coach and sowing dissent. And if they would have just spent half that amount of energy on trying to improve their player, From a skill, strength or mental standpoint, there would have been no issue with their kid getting on the floor.

Kid or kids were far and away talented enough to play and push anyone on the team to have that time. Instead, they spent so much energy and wasted so much of their time on trying to tear down other players and tear down the coach. It [00:07:00] ended up being It's a waste of everyone's time and such a disservice to the girls at the end of the season.

What I would say is, take a real hard look at what you're doing from that time period when my daughter was not getting any playing time and really struggling to get time and practice in scrimmages. Her routine throughout the week looked like two practices that were about three hours in duration. She would lift one time with the club and then outside of that she was lifting three times a week independently in a program that was volleyball specific.

She was doing lessons two to three times per week and she had at least one to two mental training sessions with a sports performance coach. And all of those things were things that she did in order to ensure when she reached the following season that there's no way she would not be on the floor.

There's a recruiting consultant named Jamie Moon, who is also [00:08:00] a very well plugged in and really a level headed consultant. And on Twitter, she posted recently, 6 percent of high school athletes go on to play college volleyball. Be honest with yourself. Are you truly outworking 94 percent of high school athletes in this country?

If the answer is no, make a plan and stick to it with consistency. I can't stress enough, the one irrevocable truth is that the best players play. It is a gladiator sport at every single level and law of the jungle wins, period. If you want to ensure that your kid is on the floor, do everything possible within your abilities and your resources to ensure that they are the best player possible, but they have to want it.

Again, from our first episode, when we talked about the attrition rate. Over the course of time to getting to college volleyball, there's a [00:09:00] reason why so many kids don't make it to the collegiate level. A lot of them just don't have the drive. And if they don't have the drive, you can't place that blame on the coach.

There are kids that work very hard and many of those are the ones that actually reach the collegiate level. There's a pretty popular saying that goes, hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. This attributed to Tim Nottke, a high school basketball coach, and it was made popular not too long ago by Kevin Durant.

That's true. Talent can go a really long way. There's extreme talent that's almost impossible to overcome. And there are a lot of kids that fall within the same standard deviation of talent. And the ones that make it are the ones that outkick their coverage because of work habits and intrinsic motivation.

If you guys aren't maximizing. Every single possible aspect that is [00:10:00] under your control, you cannot get angry at the coach. It also doesn't do a lot of good to get angry at the coach because you're sabotaging their season and you're focusing everything on an aspect that you cannot control. The most important thing is to control the things you can control.

Some years your kid's going to be the man, some years your kid isn't. Some years you're going to have great years and you're going to have the best coach ever, and some years you're not. There's just too many variables that go into it to ensure everything. So much of that comes down to the parent dynamic.

How well the girls get along, who's motivated, what the team chemistry is, how the pieces fit together. It's not just about accumulation of talent, and it's not always about who's necessarily just the best players. But learning how to be a great player, coachable, attitude, Make yourself physically strong, and more importantly, get after it in the weight room to [00:11:00] prevent injuries so you're available.

And then work on your skills. If you do those things and spend your energy on that, and don't waste your energy on negative things, this year may not be the year that you want, but at least next year, you are properly set up for your kid to be successful. I would say that this one issue in terms of playing time covers about 85 percent of the issues out there.

And the best thing you can do is take your parent goggles off, have a real look at your kid, and then take that energy And put it towards lessons with someone that believes in your kid, but can also push them. They need to hear positive things and they need to hear belief, but they need to hear honesty.

Get your kid fit. Make them bulletproof. Make them injury resistant, so they're always available for when the time comes. And teach [00:12:00] them how to approach the game rightly, so when they have an opportunity, they can seize it. One more quote, just to wrap this up. On February 27th, 2023, Coach Kirsten Booth, who's the head coach at Creighton.

Again, amazing coach. One of the good guys that's doing phenomenal things in reaching heights with the right kind of players and the right kind of program. Tweeted this. Athletes, remember that sometimes you're doing everything right. There just happens to be a player who's better than you right now. Stay the course.

Be a great teammate and wait for that opportunity to come. It doesn't always come, but often it arrives when you least expect it. So be ready. All right, I promise the next ones will be shorter than that one. That one really covers so much that I just feel like it's important to give it that due and that amount of time.

Number two is. Your kids a vibe player. What does that mean? That's a tough one and it's pretty [00:13:00] nebulous. There are just some players that can emit a vibrant energy on the court as to where they are internally. Their feelings, their emotions, control, intimidation, all of those things can come out in a big way.

And you can look at them and tell if they're controlling the game or the game's controlling them. You can tell the minute they get on the floor where they are and everybody can just feel it. Setters feel it, hitters feel it, everybody feels it and knows where they're at. And if the vibe is self doubt, if it's a lack of confidence, if it's frustration, if it's negative for any reason, they're so strong in terms of the way they emote on the court that it can become infectious quickly and it can cost you a set in no time.

In that kind of scenario, coaches have to be careful when they're putting those kinds of players in the game. Because almost regardless of their skill level or athletic [00:14:00] ability, they can be highly unpredictable. And it's sometimes better to just leave them off the court rather than introducing that emotional roller coaster up and down and up and down that will have to be dealt with or managed throughout the tournament.

They already have so many other things they have to manage. If they put a player in, and overall team performance takes a dip because of a bad vibe, now the coach, instead of working from a neutral position, is having to dig them out of a hole to either get through that third set that they didn't need to play, or into the next game.

If your kid is a vibe player, they really need to think about some mental approaches that they can take getting onto the floor so that they can use that ability for positives to gain some momentum. If they come in in a tough situation, have them come in and be the catalyst for things to change rather than the one that's scared that drags things down further.

You [00:15:00] just have to be really careful with these kinds of players. Piggybacking off of that, number three is that players are given chances and they didn't seize them when they had a chance. Sometimes players are awesome in practice. You can sit and watch them just kill it over and over again, and they look like world killers, but then when they hit a game, there's something from an anxiety standpoint or fear of failure and they don't capitalize on the time that they're on the court.

That definitely can restrict chances as the season progresses. Sometimes I've heard parents say it's not fair. Like your kid will get put in a situation that's really tough. You might have an outside hitter that's struggling to pass and they make two or three errors in the second set and then all of a sudden your kid has to go in.

And it's really hard to pass a ball when you've been sitting on the bench for a set or two and you haven't touched a ball since warmups. And all of a sudden all eyes are on you. The other [00:16:00] team's on a two or three point run and it's got to stop. And you know, the minute you hit the court. Their coaches call in your zone.

I a thousand percent understand that this is a difficult and almost impossible situation, but understand that in the flow of the game, if the other player has made two to three serve receive errors, and then yours goes in and shanks two more, That's a four to five point run and that can sink your entire set.

I've been there. I've watched my daughter deal with it. She wasn't used to being in that position, and when it was her time at the beginning, she failed. She would come in and just shank the first ball that was served to her. She went from being a proficient player and serve, received the year before almost not being able to pass a ball period.

She'd get one to two chances, and if she didn't do anything with it, she'd get pulled. And we couldn't get angry at the coach, even though it was an impossible situation, it was her job. [00:17:00] It's what she was dictated to do, and if she wanted more opportunities, she had to be able to take control of those situations and do what she needed to do when the time came.

And then as trust built, she'd be able to get more spots. FIND And it took a long time. We had to get her with a performance coach to walk through, how do you mentally prepare in situations like that? What is it for you that you need to be ready? The minute you walk on the floor, you know the ball's coming to you.

You know a tough server's about to crank a jump serve at you that's going to move. Two feet in either direction on that float and you've got to make the pass in order to get out of that rotation and you may have to do it in a gold bracket match against the top five national team and you may do it perfectly and you may be in for two rotations and then you're going to sit the rest of the match, but that's [00:18:00] your job and that's what you're being called on to do and she worked and she worked and she And in the final third of the season, it happened where there was an opportunity for her to go in against a fairly highly ranked team when one of our other hitters was struggling in serve receive, and she was able to pass those two passes, put down one ball that she needed to put down on the outside, and get us the win in that particular set.

And then she sat the rest of the tournament. That was her job. She'd been working on that and lessons and mental preparation. And it was a skill that she developed that she could easily take onto future teams. And the next year, serve receive was pretty much cake for her. One approach we could have taken was to get angry, blame the coach, blame the club, and stir up all kinds of problems within the team.

Instead, we chose to invest and that investment [00:19:00] ended up paying off and on future teams. It made her invaluable. This one has more to do with a club or a coaching perspective than it has to do with something under your control. Sometimes it can be a difference in perspective. One thing that we will talk about down the road a lot more is putting yourself in someone else's shoes to understand their motivations, and sometimes that will reveal why decisions are made.

In this particular case, a difference in perspective is you're thinking about your year with your player because your time and resources are precious and you don't want to waste any of them. The coach is thinking about this year, but the coach also has to consider what's best for the club down the road.

Long term player development is a part of things. It's a gamble, but coaches and clubs know the best way to attract future talent is to put kids in college and win titles. There are certain years that titles mean more. 16s and 17s titles mean more than at 12s and 13s. 12s and [00:20:00] 13s, things can change a million miles between 12 and 15 years old, 12 and 16 years old.

You can be the most dominant outside hitter at 12, and you can be a bench player by 16 when everybody is caught up. After puberty's hit, things change all over the place. So there was one season I remember, and I think it was 14s for us. And we had a rival club in our area that we were playing in one of the first tournaments of the season.

And I remember distinctly two players coming on the floor in the second set that we had never seen before. They had no idea what they were doing. I remember them looking all over the place, trying to figure out where they were supposed to stand. They had no idea where the ball was going, could barely pass, had no idea how to properly set up a block, and they had no understanding of the strategy of the game in any way whatsoever.

And we beat their brains in the second set. The first set was competitive with one set of [00:21:00] players, two of them subbed out, and these two players were clearly worse than any of the other players on the team. And they got to play the second set. And they did, and a lot of matches. And that team lost a lot of sets.

If you zoom to 16s and 17s, those two players became absolutely dominant. They had traits that those coaches could identify that we did not see, based on their past experience in evaluating players and seeing thousands of them come through the door, that they knew there was something about those players that was going to bear out over time.

And they were willing to take the gamble at the younger years and take the losses In order for the development to occur over the next few seasons in order to try to chase national titles at 16, 17 and 18 and it worked. Both of those players that cost them sets and matches [00:22:00] ended up being two of the most dominant players at their age group.

And fulfilled exactly what those coaches thought they were going to do. Sometimes you're going to look on the court and you're going to see players that are messing up consistently and your kids stats are better and you're going to lose sets and your perspective is about your child, your wins this season and your investment and the coaches is about.

What's best for the long term, how quickly can they develop, and it's our responsibility to develop these kids so that by 16s and 17s they can be dominant forces that will ensure we continue to get the best players in the area and our first pick of talent within the region to build the best team possible.

And now for number five. This one's hard to hear, guys, but you might be the issue. You've likely heard the saying that if you look around the room and you can't find the then you're probably it. With around 12 girls per team and somewhere between one and [00:23:00] four ish parents per girl, statistically there's a probability that there's at least one difficult parent on the team.

And that doesn't mean difficult in a productive way. It means the one that's poisoning the well. We've had the pleasure of being on some amazing teams with some fantastic parents over our career. But every single team had at least one parent that broke the positive parent rule, despite all the warnings, all of the signs that are out there, all the references, all the videos, all the tweets, all the posts.

There are some parents that just can't help but become the sports parent. I want to play for you a quick clip. of Dan Hurley, who's the head coach at University of Connecticut for their basketball team that just won their second national championship in a row. And one of the things that is coming up more and more right now in terms of recruiting is character, not just the character of the player, but the character of the parents.[00:24:00] 

What does the family culture really look like? 

Dan Hurley: There's measurable talents you have to have, right? The height, the speed, the skill set. Um, but we spend a lot of time really focusing on, on the parents. The 

Guest: parents? 

Dan Hurley: Yeah, on the parents. Are they, are they going to be fans while they're on campus? Of, of their son?

Or are they going to be Are they going to be parents? Are they going to, um, you know, hold them accountable? Um, I have an expectation that when something goes wrong, um, that it's not the coach's fault. That it's, uh, their son's got to work harder, he's got to do more, he's got to earn his role. Uh, we've got a real old school culture here of accountability.

Um, I'm an old school coach in terms of the tone I take with my players in practice, the expectations with effort. Um, the focus on, on, on winning and we over me. Like, what does that mean? Have they played on seven different travel teams? [00:25:00] Have they transferred to four or five different high schools? Um. When you talk to the parents in the recruiting process, are they constantly complaining about the coaches after a bad game, or are they, you know, sending you a text, or are you having a conversation, uh, you know, where their son has got to do more, he's got to play harder, um, you know, he's, he's got to work on his skills, they, they tell on themselves, they drop hints, and um, You know, you, you've got the wrong type of kind of, you know, people in that inner circle around your players, uh, they'll sink your program.

Host: You need to evaluate if you're the only dissatisfied parent. And if you are, you might want to consider that may be a symptom of some of your other behaviors that are having an effect on you The team, your coach, and your daughter. I'm not saying the coaches are outright vindictive. What I am saying is that we all tend towards things that make our lives easier.

And if you're difficult to deal with [00:26:00] for the coach, staff, or the club, you may be getting pushed aside subconsciously just because it makes everyone's life easier. And this affects your kid too. That also doesn't mean that you shouldn't stand up for your kid. You're really their only true advocate that has 100 percent their best interest in mind, but you have to be fair.

You have to be balanced and you have to be level headed. And if this is your third club in four years and it keeps happening, you have your answer. You have to understand that if you're difficult to deal with and the talent level just isn't there or it's close, you're going to lose. They are not going to make their lives more difficult or more complicated.

Having to deal with you. Look, there's a myriad of other reasons why this stuff can occur and they're real. You really and truly may have a bad or inexperienced coach. The player coach personality dynamic may just not mesh very well. There can be politics for [00:27:00] sure. There can be prior relationships. You may have made a bad choice on the team where your kid was the third outside hitter, the third middle blocker.

You may just be in one of those positions that's generally created to fill out the roster and make the team profitable. Those are all real reasons too, but I would caution you greatly towards just defaulting towards one of those excuses. You can't control any of those, so it's completely non productive for you to focus on those and take the easy way out.

Blaming others is the easy way out. The hard thing is to control what you can control and invest your energy positively in the right direction to help your player get better. There's ways to take situations like this, which are really difficult, and make them a positive or growth situation. And I can guarantee that if you have a child that wants to play in college, they'll have to be [00:28:00] able to harness those above skills.

In the grand scheme of things. When you're looking at this for what you want your outcome to be, an easy barometer for how far your child will go is how fleeting their love or passion for the game is. But guys, I go through the Facebook groups. I see them, and I see how many times on groups parents start stating some sort of problem and they're following it with, it's causing my daughter to lose her love of the game.

Players that make it to an elite level don't have that mindset when they're presented with issues, some extremely severe that are way beyond my kids not getting playing time, they problem solve, they test solutions and they come up with ways to take advantage of the challenges and create growth that can be applied to the future.

That's your responsibility too as a parent is to shepherd that growth. You have to actually model that behavior for them. [00:29:00] Not everyone is built internally to have that problem solving, but you as a parent can teach that skill and you can model that behavior. Elite athletes do get tired of the situations and they want a break and it does eat up burnout points.

Absolutely, they're human, but they also know they can recharge and that they can develop a new skill set to make them better, that they can apply in the next situation when they're given the chance. Okay, to put all this in context, remember back to episode one on the importance of being intentional.

What's your goal for their career? If it's volleyball. What do you see are the most valuable lessons to learn in situations like this? In my mind the most valuable lessons are self actualization and learning to control what you can control. Your preparation, your progress in skill, strength, and mental toughness.

Behaviors that tear down coaches and create divisions [00:30:00] and deflect blame are absolute career killers and they are not tolerated at the highest levels of the game. Players that exhibit those behaviors end up a casualty of addition by subtraction. If your goal is about their life after volleyball, then think about how big of an advantage and leg up you're giving them by modeling the controllables.

You have a tremendous opportunity in difficult years to teach your kid a multitude of valuable lessons that really and truly become unfair advantages for them when they grow into adults and their professional lives. Plus in the short term. Working on those same items will make them irreplaceable teammates and players that coaches can no longer afford to keep off the floor.

Use this limited time well for future development by teaching them the invaluable skill of controlling their controllables in terms of habits, attitude, and emotional reactions. [00:31:00] In the meantime, while you're finishing out this season, which can be really difficult, I found this post by Amber Viney in the Volleyball Moms group on Facebook.

It has some pretty wise advice as a way to make a difficult season rewarding and continue to build community. I know many parents in here have difficulty with playing time for their kiddos. I get it. I have two that play. One's a libero who's on the court 99 percent of the time and another who's coming back from a year off due to a very badly broken leg.

She's a filler wherever she's needed for the game. DS, middle, outside hitter, setter. My experience is this. If you learn to care about all the players on the court, then you will always have someone to cheer for and support. It makes the time go by when yours isn't out there, because let's be real here, Volleyball is a capital T E A M, team sport.

Support all of the athletes on your team, not just your kid. [00:32:00] And you'll be showing them what it really means to be a supportive teammate. That's huge. Learning that one lesson may be enough to have a bad year. Learning how to be a good teammate, learning how to be a good human. Thanks again for listening this week.

I know this was a tough topic and I'd love to hear your experiences, thoughts, and feedback. Feel free to email me at v qa@gmail.com or find me on Twitter and Facebook at V Ball QA, or on Instagram at volleyball QNA. If you want to comment, submit a question or be a guest on the show. You can also subscribe for future episodes through Apple Podcasts and Spotify or on your favorite podcast directory.

Thanks again, and we'll tackle another question next [00:33:00] time.