So you got Cut off the School Team! Putting in the Time The disappointment of not making your school team has become a reality for many athletes. It is awful as a parent to watch your child experience that disappointment. Being selected to be a school team member is not an easy task. To be the best, you have to practice more than the rest!   Past training, ball contact, playing time and practice are the most significant determining factors in their ability to make the school team. The attempt today is to help parents put their child's disappointment into perspective. When a child comes home and is disappointed they did not make the school team. Make sure, as a parent, you put the blame where it belongs. The first gut instinct is to look for outside people or factors to place the blame. Most of the players on bigger school senior teams are club players and have been involved in organized volleyball for 4-5 years, attended camps and training sessions and worked on a planned approach to becoming better at the sport.   Just having the desire and the natural athletic ability cannot replace this amount of previous ball contact of these veteran players in the sport. A bigger school with two junior high school teams could have over 100 athletes trying out for these teams.   That means there are going to be 75 athletes who are going to experience the disappointment. The schools only have one senior team, which means the 24 athletes who played for the school's junior teams will be cut in half. That is not even considering the players transferring into the school with past volleyball experience. Making the team is not an easy thing. Be proud of your child's willingness to attend the tryouts. Ask them if they genuinely feel they should have been selected for the team. This is an essential question for your child to be able to answer. Knowing how good you are at a sport is a learned skill. Many young athletes are not objective and will look for outside factors to justify why they did not make the team. As a parent do not support this train of thought. The athlete's past effort, activities and sacrifices in their journey to achieving their goal is the single factor which should be used to understand why the tryout was successful or not. Placing blame on the structure, coach, size of the school, and the number of athletes trying out are some easy excuses for why an athlete did not make the team.   But it is not a constructive approach to developing a plan to make it next time as they are all factors over which the athlete has no control. The desire to be on the team is evident because they attended the tryouts, but it is not enough. Do they own a volleyball or have access to one they could use to put in the necessary outside-of-practice touches to compete with the other players? In the past, what activities have they done which would make them better than the others at the tryouts? What actions did they do all summer to prepare them for school tryouts? It takes a lot more than just desire to earn the right to represent the school in a sport. As a school coach, it was always evident which players had put in the time and effort between seasons. It was also the most challenging job to cut a past team member because they did not practice during the off-season more than the rest.   The lack of effort to achieve the desired goal is a hard pill to swallow but a lesson which needs to be learned. A spot on a school team which is given and not earned has little value. The disappointment of not making the team can be the fire to spark the drive needed to set the necessary steps in play to avoid failure the next time. Sometimes, even the effort put in is not enough to achieve the goal.   But the lesson learned here is many times, the journey is the lesson.    I am sorry to hear you did not make the team. The goal was not earned by the athlete's past effort before they went to tryouts. Coaches wish they could keep every player who tryouts, but it would cheapen the value of earning a spot on a school team, and that is the best lesson that can be taught. Encourage your athlete to not quit. Use disappointment as the flame to power the effort to achieve the goal next time. Michael Jordan When I got cut from the Varsity team as a sophomore in high school, I learned something. I knew I never wanted to feel that bad again. I never wanted to have that taste in my mouth, the hole in my stomach. So I set a goal of becoming a starter on the varsity. I can accept failure; everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying again.