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“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Brittney said it before I had closed the trunk.
She was sixteen. Her team had just lost in the quarterfinals. She had missed two serves late in the game, and I had the final point frozen on my phone because I was already preparing to show her what I thought had happened.
I looked at the screen.
I lasted approximately four minutes.
“You played well most of the day.”
Brittney turned toward the window.
I heard myself and stopped.
That was the first time I understood that knowing something about volleyball and knowing what my daughter needed were not necessarily the same skill.
It would not be the last.
I had entered youth sports the way most parents do: completely unqualified and extremely confident.
Quickly, I learned how to navigate tournament websites. Registration deadlines. Parking lots. Partner schedules. Which beaches required a ten-minute walk. I knew how much water Brittney needed. I knew which breakfast she would actually eat at six in the morning.
I also learned enough volleyball to become dangerous.
Platform angle.
Serve location.
Shot selection.
Blocking assignments.
I could sit behind a court and identify a problem three rallies before Brittney asked her coach about it.
For a while, I thought this made me useful.
Sometimes it did.
Sometimes it made the drive home very long. Actually, most of the time.
I knew coach Jordan understood the game better than I did.
But one morning I saw Brittney missed six serves in almost exactly the same way.
She became angrier with each one even though it was just a practice.
Finally Jordan stopped giving her balls.
Brittney wanted a correction.
She wanted him to tell her what was wrong.
He kept asking where she was trying to serve.
From my chair behind the court, I thought he was being difficult.
Apparently Brittney agreed.
The next practice she arrived early to get extra serving reps.
She picked a small area deep in the court and served at it again and again.
Some balls landed near it.
Some did not.
Jordan barely spoke.
Eventually Brittney asked why he wasn’t correcting her.
He asked whether she needed him to.
She thought about it.
No.
That answer irritated her.
A few days later She discovered she had been left off a travel roster while brushing her teeth.
She came into the kitchen furious.
I was furious too.
Before she had finished breakfast, I had constructed an argument involving attendance, tournament results, effort, fairness, and several statistics nobody had requested.
Brittney went to practice early to confront Jordan.
I nearly followed.
But I didn’t.
Later she told me what happened.
She had listed every reason she deserved to travel.
Then Jordan explained that Emma and Samantha gave the group something different.
Brittney responded by saying she was better than Emma.
Emma happened to be standing close enough to hear.
That afternoon Brittney served Emma repeatedly during practice.
Seventeen times, according to Emma.
Brittney claimed that number was exaggerated.
But nobody seemed interested in litigating it.
She came home quieter than she had left.
I asked whether she wanted me to talk to Jordan.
“No.”
That answer surprised me.
A month earlier I might have done it anyway.
Instead I asked what happened.
Brittney told me about Emma.
When the travel group left without her that weekend, she checked the scores constantly.
Emma played well.
Brittney hated that she felt jealous.
Then she hated herself for feeling jealous.
Eventually she sent Emma a message about the wind.
Nothing inspirational.
Nothing about being proud of her.
Just volleyball.
Ironically, the next morning Emma asked for help.
Three weeks later, they both made the roster.
I remember the message arriving.
I remember Brittney seeing her own name.
I remember her continuing down the list until she found Emma’s.
Her second smile was different from the first.
That next tournament stuck out in particular. I remember it like it was yesterday.
Brittney and Taylor were at match point in a semifinal when Taylor felt the ball graze her finger.
The referee called the attack out.
Nobody else had seen the touch.
Brittney thought they had won the point.
Taylor told the referee.
The call changed.
They lost the next rally and the match.
The argument afterward lasted much longer than the contact.
For days, Taylor defended the decision.
What else could she have done?
Brittney’s anger was harder to explain.
She never actually wanted Taylor to lie.
The next weekend Brittney found herself in almost the same situation.
This time she felt the touch nobody else had seen.
She called it, the they lost shortly afterward.
Years later, Taylor would become a coach.
That seemed to happen to many of the athletes Brittney competed with growing up.
The beach kept turning athletes into adults.
Not every partnership survived.
Some were not supposed to.
One coach told Brittney about a partnership she had during the late 1990s.
They spent four years together, hundreds of matches.
By the end of their partnership, every practice had become an evaluation.
Every mistake required correction.
Every conversation sounded like film review.
By the end of their partnership they had simply stopped enjoying each other there was no fight, no argument, no disagreement, they just stopped playing together.
When the partnership ended, both athletes thought they had failed.
Then they found different partners.
New systems.
Different ways of communicating.
Months later, they met on opposite sides of the net.
They smiled anyway.
That story bothered Brittney when she first heard it.
She thought endings were supposed to prove something.
Years later, she understood.
Sometimes staying is courageous.
Sometimes leaving is.
The difficult part is learning which moment you are actually in.
One time coach Jordan admitted to me that he had considered quitting. But he said that leaving just felt wrong.
Brittney, who was assisting by then, suggested they keep a notebook where coaches wrote down drills, mistakes, questions, and observations without signing their names.
The notebook became stained with coffee and sand.
Nobody cared who had invented the best idea.
The important thing was that ideas kept moving.
That was also around the time I discovered the second scoreboard.
The first scoreboard was obvious.
Who ever gets to 21 wins the game, it was simple.
The other (invisible) scoreboard existed behind the courts.
It compromised of who received the better practice group. Who was selected to travel and compete. Who had not been thanked for their help. Whose child played with whom. Which coach returned an email. Which parent had volunteered three weekends in a row. Who stayed late. Who never stayed late. Who got credit and who didn’t.
That scoreboard could keep running long after the tournament ended.
I had points on it.
Everyone did.
The trouble began when we forgot we were the ones keeping score. None of us knew how bad we were losing until a mentor who had spent decades around the game started inviting parents and coaches to breakfast.
Nothing formal.
Coffee.
Food.
A picnic table.
At first they talked about tournaments.
Then schedules.
Then weather.
Nobody solved the entire organization over breakfast.
Eventually, every single athlete, parent, and coach all got breakfast together once a month.
After about six or seven months of doing this, I think it became quite obvious how tight-nit of a community we built.
To this day, I still believe that was the turning point for the club.
It has been four or five years since Brittney graduated and moved on to play in college, but I still get invited to breakfast with the entire club every month.
The first time I was invited back after Brittney moved on the play in college, I thought I was going to be giving lectures on how to behave as a parent. But I quickly realized I wasn’t invited because I had valuable knowledge and information to give to new members of the club. I was simply part of the community.
Over the last five years only two things had changed about the breakfast…
First, the club began to host the breakfast each month instead of individual families, and for some reason, no one ever talked about volleyball in any way shape or form. It became the unspoken rule. I think it was because the community was already being built around volleyball.
Initially volleyball brought us all together, but the relationships we developed with each other are what kept us all together till this day.

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