CLUB VOLLEYBALL
Be a recruit that colleges want
If you’re serious about playing at the next level, you need to make it clear to coaches that you’ll be an asset to their program. That involves more than just playing good volleyball
IN THE MIDST OF CLUB VOLLEYBALL and prime recruiting season, many players across the country are awaiting that special moment when a college coach offers them a spot on their team. But the buildup to this moment doesn’t occur overnight, or even in a couple weeks. There’s a lot of work along the way. For an athlete, the recruiting process can be terrifying and overwhelming, filled with long email chains to multiple coaches, campus visits, team introductions, nerves and big decisions. But it’s also filled with a special kind of excitement that evolves as you embark on a personal journey to discover not just where you will call home, but who you will call your family.
The modern age of technology has simultane- ously closed the gap in the recruit/coach relation- ship and expanded the reach of both players and coaches. This has resulted in an online recruiting process that can be sterile, full of copy-and-paste emails and recruiting profiles that are just skeleton outlines of the player. As a player who went through this process, I
found that recruiting websites, while helpful, just couldn’t capture my personality or my passion for the sport. What I wanted to know was, in a sea of names and stats and highlight reels, what could I do to stand out?
Know what you’re looking for Simone Froley, a freshman opposite at NCAA
Division II University of California, San Diego, knows the recruiting world inside and out. Her re- sounding statement regarding the process, whether it’s a DI scholarship at a school that traditionally contends for a national title or a walk-on spot at the NAIA level, is: “Know what you want.” This seems like pretty straightforward advice, but players often overlook it while worrying about contact- ing as many coaches as possible, which can lead to messy and unfocused conversations with coaches.
By Jaimee Rindy
EARLY FOCUS: UC San Diego’s Simone Froley made a decision to play NCAA Division II volleyball instead of Division I to allocate more time to her studies. (Photo: UC San Diego)
“I think a good place to start is deciding which division you want to play in,” Froley says. “I knew I wanted to play at a high level, but I decided to go with D-II so I could focus on school.” By all accounts, it’s important to un- derstand the aims of a team and determine whether they line up with your own wants and desires. And, even if being recruited to play volleyball in college feels like a dream, you must root yourself in reality and deter- mine what kinds of physical, mental and commitment demands you’ll be able to meet. Where physicality is concerned, Laura
Kuhn, the associate head coach at the Uni- versity of Kansas, says her program’s priorities
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are situational. “We’re looking at the total package, so we might take a middle who’s a bit smaller but fast,” says Kuhn. She says that skills aren’t as much of an indicator of wheth- er a player is a good fit as personal traits. “We sign kids who we think will chal- lenge the team and raise the level of our gym,” she says. The relationship between the coach and
player is important because you’ll spend a lot of time in each other’s company. For Froley, this was a key factor in her decision to attend UCSD, where the head coach is Ricci Luy- ties, a former beach pro and a member of the U.S. Olympic Men’s Volleyball Team that won gold in 1988.
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