Ridgecrest Starlings 2009

Wow it has been a busy couple weeks. We had an election, The middle school volleyball season ended. My club volleyball season started. Thanksgiving is only 4 days away.

I have been swamped lately. I hoped to expand my volleyball club out to two teams this year. I had 8 girls last year. This year I had 29 show up for tryouts. We finally split them into three teams. A 16s team, an older 14s team and a young 13s team. The make up of these teams took about 2 weeks and personally cost me several hours of sleep each night, five lbs that I lost worrying about making the right choices, and most hearbreakingly of all, it cost me "my volleyball team". I started this club last year with the belief that a coach should start with a young team. And then when that young team grew up, and moved up in age groups, that coach should move up with them. However because of way too many concerns to try and write about here, I ended up splitting my team from last year onto all three of the teams. My team was not only split apart but I had to give up coaching two thirds of them. Worse yet, the oldest three that I had to give up were the three girls that I have been coaching for the last three years. Putting them on to a different team with a different coach felt a lot like having to give away some of my own children.

Fortunately the girls don't seem to be bothered by this at all. It doesn't seem to bother most of them that they have been split up and that I will not be their coach anymore. So I keep asking myself, if they don't care, why do I? But I do. And regardless of how often I rationalize it, and regardless of how easily my players have moved on - it still hurt to let them go.

But when all was said and done, I'm pretty sure I did the right thing for greatest number of the 29 girls who showed up for my tryouts. When everything was worked out, I am coaching the 14s team. I still have three of my players from last year on my team. It looks like a have a pretty good group of 13 and 14 year olds on the team with them. We have only had a couple practices together but this group is already far advanced over last years team. So I'm starting to get an optimistic excited feeling about this team and can't wait to start practicing with them.