By Teresa Strong
I am posting this for all the VS parents of athletes... high school athletics today has become extremely competitive..that goes without saying...but for some reason in the VS community there is this mentality that having your athlete on an outside off season club such as Eastern Iowa Extreme or Rapid Spikers or Legit or Iowa Rockets or Six Pack, etc... vs a school sponsored club is a bad thing.
When is having an athlete try to make themselves a better player a bad thing??
When an athlete goes and plays on a team away from their friends and coaches it allows them to grow as an athlete and person. They acquire new skills and learn the game from a different perspective giving them a better understanding of the game. A coach that can see beyond their own program and allow their athletes to grow as a player and person are the great coaches. Those coaches who restrict their players to only their own teams are shortsighted, selfish and definitely do not have their athlete's futures in their best interests at heart and might want to refrain from coaching high school athletes.. The biggest compliment any high school coach can receive is their athletes that continue their athletic careers at the next level.
I can guarantee VS parents that NOT playing on an outside club volleyball team will not get your daughter to the next level or college offers. I promise you that U of Iowa Coach Dingman and UNI's Bobbi Peterson recruits from club teams as do 99.9% of all college coaches do!! They go to the big tournaments where they can see players from all over the country in one place.
Do you think the Haley Eckerman's and Breanna Weber's of the volleyball world played off-season on their hometown teams??? No, in volleyball, the players who achieve at a high level play on off -season club teams where college coaches coach the club teams.
So as parents do what is best for your athlete.... and sometimes that is making the hard choice to have your daughter play for a team where they can expand their skills away from VS... in the end it makes their varsity in season team better. No high school coach can prevent you from playing on an off-season team...and the smart coach will encourage it!!
I speak from experience of having two college athletes ..a Div 1 and a Div 2 ....and one professional athlete. CHOOSE TO MAKE YOUR ATHLETE BETTER!!
And remember ... be careful for what you wish for!!! Some wishes can backfire!!!!
-- Teresa Strong, Vinton
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Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT the job of a high school coach to prepare individual athletes for possible future athletic scholarships. It is the job of a high school coach to always act, work and prepare their athletes in the best way possible to help their program succeed.
I disagree with the idea that coaches who have comprehensive off-season programs for their athletes are selfish. How is that selfish? By keeping a hand in every level of their program to know what their athlete is being taught, they are building their program for success -- not their own, but primarily for the athletes who come through their programs.
Accord to the NCAA website, 2 percent of high school athletes ever receive Division I or II athletic scholarships. That means if a given program has five seniors, one-tenth of one of them will get a scholarship. This, of course, is not counting NAIA schools or Division III schools which can\'t give scholarships.
In all honesty, coaches who sacrifice the progress of their own programs for a handful of kids who MAY someday become that one-tenth are probably the selfish ones. Or just dumb.