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.