My club is not well. After years of our own self-destructiveness and the small-minded self-interest of external influences, we’re in the worst shape I’ve seen for at least 9 years (maybe even 17 if you count the time when we were the Cheetahs). For the first time, we can’t field a League Mens team. A personality alienated most of the playing group then promptly left leaving a massive hole. Technically, we should fold, but the broader volleyball community in a rare moment of enlightened thinking recognized that our demise would make the league unsustainable.
In this predicament, I’ve come to appreciate there’s a big difference between being an endangered species and a protected one. As the coach of our women’s reserves team I’m not convinced the grace we’ve been given will really help us last that long.
In a spectacularly poor display of process and sentiment, my girls were informed that they would be forfeiting their late 6pm match (on a Saturday night) 10 minutes before it started because we were fielding a player whose transfer hadn’t cleared. Suitably, the challenge came in a match against her former club. The player in question had applied for her transfer in November last year, by which her former club had 2 weeks to process. The registration spreadsheet issued by VSA earlier this year identified her as a Hawk and she even got issued with a registration card identifying her as a hawk.
I only had 6 players because with the draw giving our League team an 11am game, I didn’t have many options of getting players to stay back and play down at 6pm because of work commitments (why our women’s group has barely enough people to cover 2 teams while other clubs have multiple reserves teams with 3 or 4 on the bench is an entirely different can of worms!).
That’s not to mention that these challenges should be done after the game has been done, not before. I don’t know if it was the opposing club or the organizing body who cocked this up. I don’t even know if it was a cock-up or motivated by ill will. Frankly, I don’t care and it’s far from the issue: We’ve become a self-destructive sport.
Don’t get me wrong. There are some great people still involved with the sport, but there are at least as many others who at some point were passionate about the game, and incredibly capable, who can no longer be bothered being involved. Some will plainly tell you that being involved with volleyball is simply not an enjoyable way to spend their spare time. Others will tell you they have too much else on. All of these people would make the time if volleyball wasn’t such a headfuck, and if they did, things would be a whole lot better.
And right now would have to be a bad time to not have our best people with us. When I started playing, Volleyball SA practically had a monopoly over every form of volleyball played in the state and was among the stablest of the state bodies. Now they just don’t have the reach they used to, with so many social competitions operating outside the VSA umbrella. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and VSA isn’t necessarily unprofitable, but it says that the people who represent our sport in a traditional stronghold no longer have the constituency they once had, and that being affiliated with our association no longer holds the value proposition it once had. When our national programmes go back for their funding, I don’t imagine it’s going to be easy justifying funding a sport that didn’t qualify for the last Olympics (I’m talking indoor here) over more money for another sport that wins medals, like swimming (or even better, why not spend the money on stimulating our ailing economy). When that time comes, we’ll need every volleyballer (registered or not) to speak up but it looks doubtful that will happen. Losing our remaining indoor programme would be a bad thing indeed.
I love this sport, but quite frankly, I’m really not enjoying a lot of this. It’d be really good if I could spend more time trying to help my team win more rallies than it loses instead of trying to prevent forfeits. (In our other reserves match this year, we were 20 seconds away from forfeited because we needed two players from the earlier scheduled league game that was running late. we just got six by dragging our league libero from the game still going and putting one of my junior girls in a uniform who had just spent 12 hrs driving from albury wodonga and was just at the venue so she coulde get a lift home with her brother). Being defeated by your opponent is one thing. Being prevented from competing is whole different kettle of fish.
I like my club. I like the players I coach. I like seeing the people around me find ways to reach their full potential (on and off the court), and I like being part of something greater than myself. I’m quite happy to keep training teams and players, but this will be the last year that I set foot in a playing venue in this state as a coach (unless it’s up at Mt Lofty and run by Mt Lofty people). But for now there’s no use in hypotheticals. After all, it’s become presumptuous to assume I’ll even have a club to serve next year. Kind of sad really, since I had been looking forward to reaching eligibility for life membership (10 years next year), but it appears likely I’ll suffer the indignity of outliving my club.
