Your team needs one thing from you
by Jeff Smith
No matter what team you play for, they need the same thing from you: your commitment to being and becoming the best player and teammate you can possibly be.
This is especially true when you play for a team that is entered in a season-ending national tournament. As NBA championship coach Pat Riley says, “There are only two options regarding commitment. You're either in or out. There's no such thing as life in between.”
Playing in a national tournament is a real honor. A number of Serve City teams have competed with opponents from across the Midwest and the country at the Asics Jr. National Championships coming up in June at Navy Pier in Chicago. Typically clubs from 20-plus states play in the tournament as well as from Puerto Rico.
The level of competition at the top of each age division is very strong. Playing on such a national stage is an opportunity and a challenge. It requires excellent preparation. If you’ve never played in a national tournament before, it will be an exciting eye opener.
I know this from experience. I coached an 18s team at another club prior to Serve City that played at AAU Nationals in Orlando, Florida several years ago. Our team finished with a 3-6 record over three days and played in the 18s club division, a notch below the open, or highest, division. (Many open division players went on to play Division I volleyball collegiately.)
Competing at AAU Nationals was an inspiring and humbling experience. The level of skill and athleticism was outstanding, the best our team had seen all year, and left team members wishing we’d trained with even more passion, focus and attention to detail — i.e., more commitment.
It’s similar to practicing for the year-end school musical or band concert or studying for a final exam. You get one shot at preparing for it, with a limited amount of time at your disposal. The teams that use their limited time to get themselves as ready as they can for the moment will, by and large, enjoy the most success, while factoring in talent and experience levels.
So, what does a well-prepared national team look like?
Well-attended practices
Athletes arriving 10-15 minutes early so that they’re ready to start training as soon as their team takes the court
Players and coaches giving their full effort in every drill, game and scrimmage, not just “once they’re feeling into it.” Your feelings will follow your actions, not vice versa.
Training marked by the right kind of fun. Fun by national team standards is the joy of learning, growing, connecting and improving together while enjoying the game as we make each other better — and celebrating each other’s helpful contributions to that growth and success along the way.
A teachable attitude and a desire to be a positive influence on your teammates and team
A growth mindset where athletes are eager to stretch themselves outside their comfort zone, take chances, tackle difficult drills, goals and challenges head-on and learn and refine techniques, skills, tactics and strategies. These athletes fail on numerous occasions on the road to growth but pick up themselves and their teammates and jump back into the fray with the same bold frame of mind.
Teams that work diligently at their skills, systems, rotations and plays until they execute automatically without need to think. They don’t play perfect — no team does — but they train themselves to be consistently in the right place at the right time using the right technique and in the right mindset. Every little detail makes a big difference in a team’s play.
Training with such energy and passion that athletes leave the gym after each practice feeling sweaty, tired, a bit sore and excited about the progress of their team and themselves
Even getting in occasional extra reps on your own time between practices. The more expensive clubs do positional training each week; we have to be creative in training at home or elsewhere to keep sharpening our skills and bodies outside of practice.
Are you committed to being this kind of national player and teammate? That’s what your team needs from you. Make the conscious decision today to be a fully committed teammate.
Now, giving a full commitment won’t guarantee a slew of wins at nationals, nor ensure that you’ll always play at the top of your game. But it will enable you and your team to experience the most growth in your game and will help your team be as prepared as you can be for this challenge.
One of the most gratifying feelings in volleyball is taking the court knowing you did everything in your power to ready yourself for the task at hand. Win or lose, you feel secure in the satisfaction of giving your all to prepare for this event. You can take great pride in that truth.
When you’ve consistently practiced the way you want to play on this stage, you can relax, trust your preparation, go out and revel in the moment. You earned that right and opportunity!
So train with total commitment as your end goal, and enjoy every intense, pivotal and fun moment of the national season, even each failure, error and drill. And consider it a tremendous privilege to be part of this process. You earned a role on the national team — congratulations!
Jeff Smith is Serve City’s club director.
5 insights to know if you want to play in college
by Jeff Smith
I’ve learned a lot about college volleyball the last several years. My two daughters played collegiately (one still does), I worked as an assistant coach for a local college program, and I’ve coached a number of athletes who’ve gone on to compete at the college level in Division I, II and III as well as NAIA and the junior college circuit.
The lessons I’ve learned as a club director, coach and parent have helped me see the college volleyball scene more clearly than when I first joined the coaching ranks 23 years ago. Hopefully these realities will help you as a parent, as an athlete thinking about college volleyball or as a coach who wants to work the collegiate ranks someday.
The main lesson I’ve learned is an obvious one:
1) Earning a spot on a college volleyball team roster is hard.
Did you know that only six percent of high school volleyball players make a college roster? That’s about one out of every 17 high school volleyball athletes. That includes every level of college, from Division I (Stanford and Wisconsin down to the smallest D1 schools) on down the line.
There’s tremendous competition for roster spots, even for small colleges. I assistant coached at Wheaton College in 2018. Wheaton’s enrollment is 2,850 students, yet our volleyball team was comprised of athletes from California to Florida, from Arizona to Virginia and all in between.
College rosters are filled primarily by the top high school players. At Wheaton College most of our 19 players were first-team all-conference and all-area selections their senior year of high school. A few even earned all-state recognition. And this was a tiny college at the DIII level. The competition for landing a coveted college roster spot is intense. You have to commit yourself to developing your skills and body to maximum effect and beat out a litany of other athletes for these coveted spots.
2) Earning playing time on a college volleyball team is even harder.
The average college volleyball program roster features 16 to 20 players. The reality is only 9 or 10 players earn consistent playing time in the team’s rotations. That means about half of the roster sees little playing time in matches. To earn time on the court in matches takes tremendous commitment, skill, perseverance and sometimes fortunate breaks for you, such as an injury or two at your position.
The truth is nearly everyone on the roster is battling for playing time, so competition for spots is higher than what you’re accustomed to seeing at the club or high school levels.
3) The level of commitment demanded of college players is much higher than club or school.
As a first-time college assistant coach, I was impressed with the amount of time, effort and sacrifice that the athletes invested in our program. A typical week for these athletes was unlike anything they’d experienced at the club or high school levels.
A couple of years ago, my assistant coach was a former Division I volleyball player. She said the first month of preseason college volleyball was so grueling to her as a freshman that she thought about quitting nearly every day — and some of her freshman teammates did in fact quit. The demands of the college volleyball schedule were more challenging than she’d ever faced before.
Here was a general preseason practice schedule at Wheaton and at another local college, Judson:
Monday: two 2 1/2- to three-hour practices plus weightlifting, conditioning and team meetings (typically 8- to 10-hour days)
Tuesday: two three-hour practices plus weightlifting, conditioning and team meetings
Wednesday: same
Thursday: same
Friday: same
Saturday: one practice and team meetings
Sunday: off to rest and recuperate
Monday: rinse and repeat
Once matches and classes began in late August, the schedule changed but was still loaded.
Monday: 2 1/2-hour practice, weight training and team film work on next opponent
Tuesday: away match — leave at 3:30, arrive at 5:30 (some away matches were at conference foes in Wisconsin, Indiana or Iowa), quick snack, warm-ups, match, post-match dinner on the road, arrive back on campus as late as 11:30 or midnight
Wednesday: 2-hour practice, team film work on next opponent and weight training
Thursday: home match — arrive in gym at 5:00 for team meeting, stretching, warm-ups and match that ends around 9:00
Friday: 2 1/2-hour practice and weight training
Saturday: away match — leave at 9:30, arrive at 11:30, stretching and warm-ups, match at 1:00, leave the gym at 3:30, dinner on the road, arrive back on campus at 6:00 or 6:30
Sunday: rest, recuperate and cram in a lot of schoolwork
This schedule ran from late August to mid-December at Judson, and it was just as intense for the reserves who rarely played as it was for the starters. It required devotion and excellent time management skills, especially for juniors and seniors tackling demanding schedules for their majors.
Even the off-season training schedule is challenging. The volleyball players at Judson University in Elgin will be doing a mix of weight training, conditioning and skill development for four days a week from January to April. There is no real off-season for college volleyball players.
At the community college level many college programs have off-season training as well. College of DuPage, where my younger daughter played for two years, trains its athletes twice a week from January to April, culminating in a Saturday off-season tournament in Ohio, and twice a week in June and July to gear up for the next season. College volleyball is nearly year-round at all levels.
4) If you love volleyball and earn playing time, playing collegiately is the most gratifying segment of your volleyball playing career.
The key here is love. If you love the sport, playing college volleyball is satisfying in many different ways. You get the opportunity to play volleyball at the highest level. You get to compete against the best competition you’ve ever faced. You get to represent your university on the court. You get the invest the most focused time and training into your development as a volleyball athlete. You get to test your limits as an athlete with the most concentrated training and competition you’ll ever tackle. You’ll get to travel to tournaments and opposing colleges around the region and even across the country depending on your school. You’ll get to develop friendships with teammates who share your passion for the game and with whom you share long bus rides, overnight trips to tournaments, practices, matches and team bonding.
The key is you have to be all in. When it comes to commitment, you’re either in or you’re out. There’s no such thing as an in-between commitment. Coaches will cut athletes whose dedication isn’t 100 percent.
You also have to train yourself to think beyond today. As a freshman or sophomore, you might find yourself buried on the bench behind a junior or senior. If you focus solely on the reality of today, you’ll get discouraged and want to give up. You have to be able to see beyond your current situation, think about future opportunities and possibilities and keep improving your skills, your volleyball IQ and your body for when opportunity knocks again in the future.
And that future could be sooner than you expect. I also learned this as a college assistant:
5) College head coaches are highly motivated to win and will bench players in a heartbeat.
I still remember one of my first matches as a college assistant. We lost a tight first set to the conference’s first-place team and then were struggling in the second set when, during a timeout, the head coach asked us as assistants a question that surprised me. “Jess is really struggling. Should I pull her from the match?” Jess was our all-conference libero. Yes, she wasn’t playing well in the back row, but she was one of the top liberos in the league and our best back-row player by a wide margin, and yet the head coach wanted to take her out of the match against our toughest opponent to date.
This moment repeated itself a few times during the season and taught me a lesson. College volleyball is a results business, and no one is immune to being benched or subbed out in a heartbeat if it means improving the team’s chances to win. All playing time is earned and must be continually earned over and over again throughout the season. Playing time is a privilege, not a right.
Jeff Smith is Serve City’s club director.
Answers to all of your college volleyball questions
by Jeff Smith
Since we created our new college volleyball recruiting page earlier this month, we’ve received a lot of inquiries and questions from families and athletes ranging from 17U to 13U, which is awesome! I love college volleyball. I assistant coached for a year at Wheaton College, have two daughters who play collegiately and have seen about 35 of my former club and school players go on to college volleyball programs. From Division I to junior college, college volleyball is an incredible experience in many ways for student-athletes.
To help out families and athletes who would like more information about the college volleyball world, I’m going to touch on a few popular questions that people have asked me. This will be at a high-level, 30,000-foot view. For more in-depth perspectives, feel free to fill out our online inquiry form on our college recruiting page.
How do I get recruited?
For most athletes, it’s really about the athletes recruiting the colleges they’re interested in playing for. The only athletes who get pursued by colleges without doing anything on their end are the very top players at the high school and club levels, what I’d refer to as the top 3-4 percent of volleyball players in the country from ninth to 12th grade.
To get started on the recruiting front, athletes need to create an online recruiting profile with a college recruiting organization such as the NCSA. This profile enables you to send a link to your profile to coaches of college programs you’re interested in as well as serve as a holding place for details about you as a volleyball student-athlete: your biographical volleyball information, your college interests (Division I, Division II, Division III, NAIA, junior college), your contact information and links to YouTube videos of you playing in matches. (Having your mom or dad video some of your matches and posting these videos on a YouTube channel for you is vital to generating college recruiting interest.)
Your recruiting online profile is also helpful in that college coaches who visit the NCSA or another recruiting website looking for a specific type of player can find you there if you fit their needs. These profiles should be created if you or your daughter are in ninth to 12th grade, preferably ninth or 10th grade at the outset.
The next step is creating an introductory email template, gathering the email addresses of college coaches you’d like to contact and sending out emails to college coaches introducing yourself and expressing your interest in playing for their program. This initial email should be short (two to three paragraphs) and should include links to your recruiting profile and to your YouTube volleyball channel that features videos of you playing for Serve City and your school. This email should also ask a couple of questions of the coach to demonstrably show your interest in their program.
Your introductory email should just be a starting point. College coaches receive a glut of emails from prospective athletes interested in their program. Send email updates to these coaches every 4-8 weeks that include any new information about you as a player, including upcoming tournaments where you’ll be playing, as well as links to new videos of you playing. When you’re a junior or senior, the NCAA allows you to begin text messaging college coaches as well, which is a great way to get their attention.
I can’t stress highly enough the importance of sending college coaches video footage of you playing. Most college coaches have limited recruiting budgets. They won’t start recruiting you until they’ve seen you play on video. And these videos should not be edited highlights of you making great plays. Coaches want to see long-form videos of entire sets that show your full game, warts and all. If all they see are edited short videos of you playing error free, they’re more likely to ignore you. They want to see your full game and how you react to making passing, setting, hitting and blocking errors.
Coach Jessica of 13 Blue caught the interest of Judson University’s head coach when I sent Judson’s coach video footage of Jessica playing for her high school, for Serve City and for Harper College, where she played junior college ball as a freshman. Without this footage, Judson’s coach would not have recruited Jessica to her program.
You can also create skill videos of yourself. For instance, if you’re a DS or libero you can make videos of you digging attacks and passing serves in a gym if you have a coach or family member who can hit attacks over a net at you off a box and serve tough serves at you over a net.
And make sure your emails (and later, texts) are a two-way street. Ask the coaches questions about their needs for their program and the quality of their college, especially when you enter phase 2 of your recruiting, when coaches express interest in you with follow-up emails, texts or phone calls. And if you’re a strong academic student, be sure to stress this in your emails and phone calls. Most coaches want to recruit athletes that they know will not ever be in danger of getting academically suspended from their team due to poor grades.
What is it like to play in college?
Division I is the most demanding level of college volleyball. One of my former players was a three-year starting outside hitter at the University of Illinois-Chicago. I saw her play at UIC in five or six games. As her father told me while we watched one of her matches, playing Division I volleyball is like having a job.
The typical DI program’s season will begin with six-days-a-week on-campus training in early to mid-July, with the team practicing, weight-lifting and conditioning 6-8 hours a day. Once the season begins in early August, you’ll be practicing twice a day until mid-August, then once matches begin your schedule will consist of 2-3 matches a week and 2-3 hour practices and workouts on days you don’t have matches, taking Sundays off. The DI season runs until mid-November to mid-December depending on how far your team advances in the postseason. Then the DI off-season program begins with weight training, conditioning and eventually skill development from January to April. The DI athlete’s involvement in volleyball is a 9-month to 10-month season.
Division II, DIII and NAIA are less intensive than Division I, but still are demanding. Coaches give their athletes a summer training schedule to complete at home comprised of weight training, conditioning and skill practice from May to July. The season then begins with two-a-day practices from early August to mid-August and then the DII, DIII and NAIA teams’ schedules look very similar to Division I from mid-August till season’s end in November or early December.
DII, DIII and NAIA programs’ off-season training isn’t quite as demanding as DI. For instance, at Wheaton and at Judson University, where 13 Blue coach Jessica Smith plays, the off-season training runs from late January to April. It consists of weight training and conditioning for 2-3 days a week in January and February and then adds in skill development training in March and a couple of spring team tournaments in April. DI programs’ off-season training is more demanding time-wise, with athletes training five days a week.
Community college programs are the least demanding programs at the college level. Some have off-season training, such as College of DuPage, where Coach Nicki of 12 Red played for two years. COD trained twice a week for 3 hours a week from January to April and from June to July, then practiced and played from mid-August till the end of October. Another advantage of junior colleges is that you can live at home and save money this way, and you can develop your skills and athleticism to prepare you to be recruited by four-year colleges for your junior and senior years.
Playing time is earned at the college level. The typical DI to DIII and NAIA programs have rosters of 15-20 athletes, and playing time is limited. A typical team will play 9-10 players in each match, so competition for playing time is intense. Some freshmen and sophomores get little playing time, while other freshmen and sophomores crack the team’s rotation quickly, and playing time is based on who are the best fits for each position regardless of class level, and playing time doesn’t carry over from year to year. A starter as a freshman could find herself mired to the bench as a sophomore if someone else beats her out for a spot in the lineup the next season.
The one comment I’ve heard most often from former players of mine and their families about college volleyball is that playing college volleyball helped them build relationships immediately when they got to college as new students, and what a privilege and honor it was to play volleyball at the highest level in our country. As a former DIII assistant coach, I’d also remark that DI isn’t the only strong volleyball level in college. DII, DIII and NAIA all feature excellent volleyball; the explosion of volleyball participation at the club level has permeated every level of college volleyball.
I was extremely impressed with the quality of play and the amount of commitment shown at the DIII level as a college coach in 2018. Some of our players at Wheaton were all-conference, all-area and all-state players as high school seniors and were very talented and dedicated players. All of them were the top players on their high school and club teams as well. And the NAIA level is outstanding, too. The junior college level has also grown better and better in recent years and now features tons of strong volleyball players who simply chose to live at home and commute to college.
When do college coaches begin recruiting?
DI coaches begin recruiting athletes in eighth and ninth grade. DII and DIII coaches start recruiting athletes in ninth, 10th and sometimes 11th grade. NAIA coaches tend to begin recruiting in 11th grade, and junior college coaches tend to start the process in 11th grade and even wait till 12th grade. Many junior college coaches wait till the summer and fall of your senior year to begin recruiting you for obvious reasons, such as to find out which athletes want to play at a community college instead of a four-year school.
More information to come
This is high-level information in this blog post. I’ll touch on more topics and go deeper in these topics in the coming weeks.
Jeff Smith is Serve City’s club director.