I’ve created this site to share information to other coaches and players in the world of volleyball. I am passionate about volleyball and boys volleyball in particular. In Wisconsin, boys volleyball is only in a handful of schools. I’m not sure of the exact number off the top of my head but I want to say about 50 schools. Yet, when you look at adult leagues, the majority of players are men.
The reason for this, I feel, is that boys tend not to want to play high school volleyball due to the stereotypes associated with the sport. Things like, “Isn’t volleyball for girls?”, and “Haha, no, I play football!” are what a boys coach hears a lot. I even made the “volleyball is for girls” statement the night I played volleyball for the first time many years ago. Later that evening, I became dedicated to becoming the best player I could and here I am now, coaching and still loving the sport.
These same boys graduate high school, not realizing their dreams of playing in the NFL, NBA, or MLS and want to play a sport. Volleyball comes around most often because many companies have teams. These boys, now men, often wish they would have played volleyball in high school because there are some other guys on the court that play really well and men are, of course, ultra-competitive. They also realize how fun the sport is, something the boy in them never even thought would happen.
It is my job, especially at Neenah, to build up the program into a respectable sport. At Neenah in the fall , the Cross Country and Soccer teams are perennial powerhouses and football is simply football. It’s hard to get numbers for any sport, let alone one that is incorrectly thought of as a sissy sport by boys. The solution is starting younger. Young boys start playing Soccer sometimes at 6 years old. Every boy has thrown and caught a football. But there is not a lot of volleyball being played by young boys out there. Often times, moms and dads don’t let the younger kids play during picnics and family get-togethers because they might get stepped on by a drunk guy (I don’t want to get started on that rant).
The fact is, we need more schools in the U.S. to start boys volleyball programs. We need our local newspapers to feature more stories on it, and for pete’s sake, when our country wins a total of 3 Gold and 2 Silver Medals in the Olympics/Paralympics in the sport, we need national attention. If you are a young man interested in the sport or you are a parent who would like to see boys volleyball at a local high school, do something about it.
