New volleyball league seeks to provide less costly alternative to club play

Making the high school volleyball team can be an expensive adventure.

The journey for many players in the U.S. 280 area starts in junior high by joining a local club team. In these programs, young players spend invaluable time working with skilled coaches who often play or instruct at the collegiate level. Players often exit these travel programs and easily walk onto school rosters. 

But the cost adds up quickly after paying for those experiences and even more so after travel begins.

“Club volleyball can be a very expensive sport to be involved in,” Conley Lovette said. “It can be $1,700 just to play, but add in hotels and travel, and you’re looking at $3,500 every season.”

Lovette is one of several area residents who have banded together as volunteers to help families afford the experience of club play. Recently, he became one of the founders of Y Club Challenge, a volleyball league based at the Greystone YMCA that has created a way to reduce the overhead per player to approximately $600 a season.

The idea for Y Club Challenge was born out of League Director Aaron Joy’s desire to keep his championship team of recreational league players together as they inched closer to the age of high school competition. When 11 of his 12 pre-teen players made their respective school teams, they found themselves at the mercy of a rule that would break the recreational team apart.

“Athletic rules state you can’t have more than three girls from a school team playing on the same club team,” Joy said. “I told them I’d be able to coach them one more season, and I’d have to break them up.”

But when the time came to disperse, Joy said several of his players wouldn’t be joining area club teams due to the expense. He started looking for a solution, and he found it at the YMCA.

Y Club Challenge has a “much lower facility cost,” Joy said. As another cost-cutting measure, his program also uses volunteer coaches. One of Joy’s first recruits to lead a team was former Oak Mountain High player Madelyn Lovette, Conley’s daughter.

Madelyn, who was diagnosed at age 4 with a permanent visual impairment caused by damage to her optic nerve, had experience playing with the Eagles and with the Alabama Juniors, a club team based in Hoover. She accepted, and added Joy and her father to the roster as assistants.

“She’s worked with me about a year and a half,” Joy said of Madelyn. “But she’s getting older and she aspires to be a coach. Even though she’s 17, she wants to take more on.”

The league currently has four teams, two of 12-year-old players and two of 13-year-olds. Volunteer coaches for the other 13-year-old team, labeled more familiarly as U13, are Our Lady of the Valley teacher and coach Alison Thompson and her friend and UAB employee Catherine Cussimano.

Brent Voisin coaches one of the league’s two U12 teams, while Greystone YMCA employees Tavie Cobb and Viveka Rosenberger coach the other.

For its initial season, Joy said players weren’t required to attend all tournaments to keep costs down for families, but the teams did compete locally in the Heart of Dixie Tournament and the Sting Freeze Tournament.

Joy said the current goal for Y Club Challenge is to recruit more volunteer coaches and players into the club. He said he anticipates the league will grow to add a U14 next year.

“For really serious players, parents know who they are and $600 is a drop in bucket for a $100,000 scholarship,” Joy said.

For more information on Y Club Challenge, email Joy at ajoy@joepowell.com.