Haileybury, aggressive recruiting & the burden of volleyball parents

At AVSC this year, Haileybury came out of nowhere. I literally had never noticed them before at the tournament. I spoke to one of their Open Honours players who used to go to Eltham while we were watching a game on the show court, and spotted a former Upwey player I had coached against playing against our U17 div 1 girls. So, I figured this must be a Victorian school, which made it all the much more peculiar, since you don’t just qualify for the Victorian honours spots out of “nowhere” with established schools like Upwey, Eumemmerring, Eltham, Luther, Wonthaggi, Monbulk etc all out there.

So I googled “Haileybury Volleyball” and got some interesting results. The top two results were Melbourne Age articles, which I’m sure any Victorian volleyballer reading out there would be familiar with:

• “School accused of rough play on young athletes”
• “Church to probe poaching scandal”
• “Winner takes the ball”

When google gives you these kinds of news articles ahead of the school’s official website, you can only imagine what kind of day Haileybury’s publicist would have been having during all this! [N.B. visit this blog to find out how to improve your google listing at no expense!]

It was all news to me, but Haileybury had been accused of poaching a substantial number of volleyball players to populate a new campus. According to the articles, it wasn’t just volleyball players they were attracting, but up to 200 scholarships to new students that were reportedly being advertised widely. I guess where the volleyball aspect became visible in all this was how a whole year 10 Eumemmerring team was allegedly lured over!

I’m not going to make any judgement calls on all this, since I’m not well informed of the facts, and know nothing beyond my cursory google search. [Besides, as a South Australian, I know better than to prod my nose into the parochial affairs of my neighbours to the east]. But this makes me think about 2 big issues in volleyball: “poaching”, and the price that parents pay for their children’s volleyball careers.

Poaching

I can say that as a development coach, poaching really hurts. Anyone who knows me, and my club, Henley hawks will understand why. In the short years I played at my club, we lost 4 players we substantially invested in, to rival clubs – 2 of whom are currently in VTAM. As a development coach I’ve lost plenty of players too. The very first player I coached who now plays semi-professionally in Europe ended up going to another club. Although it was bad at the time, we patched things up and remain close. In the end I was just pissed off that he didn’t tell me before I found out from everyone else. I also lost 4 players from a junior boys premiership team I had coached over three years – half the bloody team!

Poaching can be cruel. It can be like cutting off a club or programme at the knees. You do all this work and then some shrewd recruiting from a rival just takes it all away overnight. At Hawks, we needed those juniors. We had wiped the slate clean with our juniors, and had nothing but a couple of teams made up of kids barely out of primary school. We had no players in between them and an aging senior group.

The people who ran the club weren’t going to poach as an alternative. If you’re running a club, ALWAYS keep a close eye on the club out there that has an unsuccessful or non-existent juniors programme coupled with an aging playing group. Hawks was really at the crossroads. We had to shepherd these kids up the ranks. The succession plan became my obsession for a number of years and I became as vigilant as a gamekeeper warding off the poachers I knew were out there. It was a stressful time, and I doubt a lot of the people there now fully appreciate just how dire things were. Thankfully things are much better now.

I must confess with great shame that I was once guilty of poaching. There was a player I wanted to recruit from another club to bolster our junior boys group and I was less than passive in luring him over. It didn’t go ahead, and my club president stepped in before it became too embarrassing. I patched it up with the president of the player’s club, but it remains a personal blemish for me on my coaching career and life.

Poaching became a real problem in SA, and because of it, the organising body for state league introduced penalties clubs could impose on players that wanted to move unjustly – transfer fees, repayment of outstanding fees, players could even be banned from competition in extreme cases. And so my mentors at the club had instructed me that if players from other clubs got in touch with me because they weren’t happy with their club and wanted to move, I was to remain neutral and passive and let them go about the process. They were very wise in telling me this and I was foolish to not follow it that one time.

I lost a lot of players I worked hard on for years. Sometimes they left my club. Other times they were players I worked a lot with at the schools I coached for who decided to go to other clubs. 2 of the players in Brighton’s champion Open Honours Boys team were kids I lost in that premiership team at Hawks. We could have really used them at the club too. It used to cut me every time.

Over time, I got over it. People are free to pursue their own paths in life. It sucks that you might feel a sense of disloyalty, but what can you do? Only you can follow what you believe is right. You can’t impose it on other people. And so despite having my own standards of honour and loyalty, I could no longer expect the same from others. And in time i was able to accept it without being begrudging about it. After all, just because I loved my club and felt indebted to it, didn’t mean anyone else had to, and i had no right to make anyone feel bad about it.

The burden of being a volleyball parent

Some of the best people I’ve had the opportunity to meet in volleyball are the parents and families of the kids I coach. Parents give so much to their kids and the sport. Hawks is a family club, and so many of these families have been a big part of my life over the years and I’ve been lucky they’ve made me a part of theirs.

I might be preaching to the choir here, but parents have to spend shirtloads of time and money on their children’s sporting careers. There are club fees, trips to the schools cup, state trips, obscure tournaments, overseas trips if they make the national teams, injuries and operations, doctors and specialists, uniforms, shoes for feet that keep growing, petrol for long drives… the list goes on. We also shouldn’t forget that we now have beach volleyball, which ensures that this goes on all year round! If you’re a player, try adding up how much your parents spent on you over the years and make sure you buy them a nice house in their old age.

Volleyball can be real expensive. It’s not like [Australian Rules] Football, where the AFL makes so much money that it can trickle it down to the grass roots and make participation all the more affordable. So why do they do it? There’s no easy answer, and no single answer.

The dream

Some do it because they share their children’s dreams of making it in the big time. While i was watching the beach volleyball yesterday, I spoke to a parent at the club who had 2 kids attend the Bendigo camp after AVSC. Both made it into the top 20s. The whole family was overjoyed. I told him how it never ceases to impress me how much he and many of the other parents out there spend on their children’s careers. He just smiled and said that when you can see that they can really make it, it just makes it all worthwhile. I’ve known the parents of about 4 young players who have been the recipients of AIS scholarships, and I can say that there is this enormous outpouring of relief that comes when they know they’re not under pressure to find the money for 2 overseas trips a year anymore. There’s a lot of joy too. But there’s definitely relief.

Keeping out of trouble

Others know their kids won’t make the national team, but they know that when their kids are at games and trainings, they’re not out there getting into trouble. I’ve seen a lot of troubled kids stay out of trouble because of sport. Sadly, I’ve seen enough that get into trouble when they stop. There was a very troubled kid that Funky and I coached over the years that many people said the club should have thrown out on numerous occasions. Sadly the decision was finally taken away from us when he broke a court ordered curfew and ended up in juvenile detention.

Metaphysics

For some parents, they just feel that sport teaches their kids valuable life skills. My folks were definitely in that boat. I had little propensity to get into any real trouble and was pitifully talentless that I would never really amount to much as any sort of athlete.

The Payoff

A couple of days ago I wrote about the professional opportunities you can now have in volleyball. Well, obviously benefits can also exist beyond the professional sphere. For everything that parents put in, there can be more tangible benefits than just a professional career.

A scholarship to a private high school would seem to be an example of this in the case of Haileybury. The ethics can be argued till the cows come home, but I bet that there’s at least one parent out there who has already spent a shirtload on their kid’s career who would find an affordable private education quite attractive and justified. You can’t blame a parent’s motivation in doing what they can to give their kids the best opportunities in life with what they got.

Special Interest Volleyball

In SA, we don’t really have academically selective public high schools anymore [like Melbourne High, MacRobertson, Sydney High, Baulkham Hills], so you just have to hope your live in the zone of one of the better public schools. Easier said than done, since they tend to be in the more expensive areas. Outside of the eastern suburbs, the best public school could quite possibly be Brighton Secondary, and lo and behold, they have a Special Interest Volleyball (SIV) programme that gives kids outside the zone the chance to enrol there! [N.B. Brighton Secondary also has an elite music programme open to kids outside their zone that pre-dates SIV. Ironically, it was how my sister got to go there before SIV came in]

Henley Hawks is one of the few clubs that has a juniors programme that extends to kids in primary schools. We’ve become a place where primary school aged kids come to get skilled up in volleyball so they can get into the Brighton’s SIV programme, and in turn Brighton Secondary School. Some are in the zone, some aren’t. Not all our juniors play for us just to get into Brighton. Like my parents who tutored me to do well in the private school scholarship exams, I now tutor kids in volleyball so they can get into Brighton SIV.

After they get in, the future’s uncertain. Some stay with us, and some leave us for Brighton’s junior Holdfast Shores club to play with their new school friends. And some are lured to play for other clubs that used to have stronger affiliations with Brighton, but still have a strong influence there. It’s always bit of a worrying time for the club. It’s usually “all in or all out” for the players who have to make the choice. Like Eumemmerring, we could lose an entire team or keep an entire team.

It’s not cheap for parents to send kids to our club, or any club for that matter, so I can understand their perspective when they feel that their obligations to the club end when accounts are settled. Clubs don’t make much money out of any of this [I was the treasurer for 3 years, so I know!], so I can understand how clubs would expect that the return they get for developing players is more than just monetary.

So what’s more important: The debt of honour you owe to the individuals and their institutions who give to you things that they receive little in return for, and have profound yet minimal intrinsic value? Or, getting the best opportunities you can for your kids out there given that you spend so much on them already and you don’t always have all the money in the world to make the other choice?

As a development coach and hardline zealot of a club that was in a lot of trouble, the answer used to be very simple. But I don’t have the answers anymore. And with my Buddhist/Taoist leanings these days, I no longer have the desire to find them.

But what I do know is that for all our sakes, volleyball needs to be getting in The Age for all the right reasons. Let’s all hope that we get better search results next time we google a school’s volleyball programme that we’re curious about.