Survey: Your Daughter’s Participation in One-Day Tournaments in Northwest Indiana

Deadline to respond to survey is noon on Saturday, January 9

In our ongoing effort to provide both the best and the safest club volleyball experience possible for our athletes, we have found two club tournaments taking place in Hammond, Indiana, just across the border from Illinois in Northwest Indiana, a drive of approximately 65 minutes from the Wheaton area. The tournaments are held at the Velocity SportsPlex in Hammond. The tournaments require face coverings for all athletes, coaches and spectators as well as physical distancing when possible. (One parent/guardian per player is allowed to attend the tournaments.) With the governor announcing that Tier 3 restrictions on indoor team sports will be lifted next week for regions meeting Tier 2 metrics, this seems like a good time to give our athletes and teams some limited tournament competition in the coming weeks.

Both tournaments are one-day tournaments. One of the tournaments takes place on Saturday, Jan. 30. The other tournament is slated for Saturday, Feb. 27. We also looked into tournaments in Southern Wisconsin, but no one-day tournaments were available for our teams.

(Indiana and Wisconsin are holding club tournaments with a full list of COVID safety restrictions for teams, spectators and referees in place. The Illinois Department of Public Health announced that Illinois teams are allowed to participate in out-of-state events.)

For our high school athletes, the IHSA, the governing body for high school volleyball, is tentatively allowing IHSA athletes to also participate in club tournaments during the winter/spring IHSA season due to the unique circumstances created by COVID-19 with the IHSA season now scheduled to take place Feb. 15 to May 1.

Registration for the two tournaments in Hammond, IN, is filling up fast due to Illinois club teams signing up that normally would be playing tournaments in Illinois. Before attempting to register our teams for these two tournaments, we are sending out the short survey below to SC families to learn if enough of our athletes would be committed to playing in these tournaments for us to field full or nearly full team rosters.

As we reported in our preseason registration fees, tournaments are not covered in the Phase 2 and 3 club fees. The cost to play in a one-day tournament is $30 per athlete. This fee covers the team’s tournament entry fee plus the coach’s stipend for the day.

If enough families commit to these tournaments, we will also immediately order uniform jerseys for each athlete so that they arrive in time for the Jan. 30 tournament if the tournament hasn’t filled up yet. Because it is looking unlikely that Illinois’ governor will loosen restrictions on club tournament play in the state, we will order t-shirt uniform jerseys from a local supplier at a significantly lower cost than our usual Adidas uniform jerseys in order to save money for our families. We would also direct families to purchase a pair of plain black spandex shorts for their daughters on their own or let their daughters wear their spandex shorts from last club season if they played with SC last year so that families could save additional money that way.

Please fill out and submit the survey below by noon on Saturday, Jan. 9 so we can immediately set the wheels in motion for these tournaments if enough families are interested. Thank you ahead for your response!