Imagine With Me For Just a Moment

I was giving a recruiting seminar at a local high school this past week. I realized too late that I was giving a 9am seminar to a group of mostly freshmen and I include a bunch numbers and statistics. I tend to include a lot of statistics in my seminars because I think that it helps put recruiting into perspective. Apparently it was too early for math that morning!

Imagine this:

Your city decided that having 8 high schools was too costly and they could save money by building one massive high school. Now, I don't know how true or untrue that would be and yes, I get it's probably unrealistic. But, stay with me. Now, instead of 10 high school varsity level volleyball programs, you only have 1 now. There would still be a JV team, maybe 2 and possibly multiple freshmen teams. Team size at each level was capped at 17.

Now, in that scenario, would you still make the varsity team in your "mega district"?

That is basically what is happening as you transfer from the high school to the club level.

Let us do some number crunching:

Any given high school Varsity team will have 17 athletes on their roster. (I know some might be bigger or smaller)

A typical district will have 7-9 teams in it. I will use 8 for the sake of argument.

8 teams x 17 athletes per team = 136

17/136 = 12.5% So the NEW varsity team in your district is made up of a little more than 12% of the previous varsity teams.

How about playing time?

Typically about 40% of any given college volleyball roster is playing in half of the teams sets each year. Basically 60% of a roster is starting and the others are barely playing, if at all.

That means 10 of the 17 athletes on the super-district varsity volleyball program are playing/starting.

10/136 = 7%

Statistically speaking - you have a better chance at starting for your super-district varsity volleyball team then you do PLAYING college volleyball; roughly 5%

I understand the argument or discussion that every district might have different levels of competitiveness. I'm just creating a hypothetical and trying to apply it.

Now what do we do? Let's say you don't make that varsity team.

Do you play on JV? Grind and refine your skills? Try and make the varsity team next year?

Do you quit volleyball altogether?

This scenario is basically what we are doing when we go from high school to college volleyball, only it's a more intense scale. We are talking about taking 8 varsity teams and turning that into 1. What really is happening is we are taking roughly 80 high schools and making 1 team out of it. That's roughly the 1.2% of high school volleyball athletes that are playing (not on scholarship, just playing) at the D1 level.

80 high schools x 17 athletes per team = 1,360 athletes

If 17 athletes from this group make the varsity team. That = 1.2%

That is how competitive this process is. That is what you're up against.

If you really want to play college volleyball be willing to work for it. Getting to the college level is difficult. Staying there and working your way onto the court is even harder. Be willing to put the work in on this side, so that the work ethic on the other side comes naturally.

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