The Little Things Coaches Notice: What We're Really Watching For
When parents ask us what we're looking for in an athlete, the conversation often starts with skills: serving, passing, hitting, setting. That's a fair place to start, but if you asked our coaches what actually shapes a team over a season, a lot of it has nothing to do with a stat sheet. It's the small stuff; the habits nobody drills, but everybody notices.
We wanted to share a few of these here, not to add one more thing for parents and athletes to worry about, but because we think they're worth talking about at home, and because they matter more than most people expect.
Body Language
Volleyball is a game of errors. If you watch the summer Olympics, anyone will see that even the best teams in the world miss serves, shank passes, and hit balls into the net. What separates a good teammate from a great one isn't whether they make mistakes, it's what their body does in the three seconds after.
A dropped head, a sigh, an eye roll, hands on hips facing away from the huddle; these are such small actions, and yet they're also loud. Teammates read them instantly, even from across the court, and they're contagious. One deflated reaction can flatten a team's energy faster than an actual point lost. On the flip side, an athlete who claps for the next serve, resets their feet, and looks ready for the next ball tells their whole team something: we're OK, let's go, next point. That's a skill too, and it's probably one of the harder ones to build. It's also one we watch closely, because it tends to predict how an athlete will handle pressure later in a match or a season.
The Small Impressions
Some of what shapes our sense of an athlete has nothing to do with a drill at all. It's what happens around practice.
Trash left behind on the bleachers. Water bottles and snack wrappers that somehow become someone else's job to clean up. An athlete unwrapping a granola bar while three teammates are pulling the net and antennas out of the closet. None of these are "big" moments, nobody's getting benched over a granola bar, but they all add up, and they say something about how an athlete sees their role on a team. Are they someone who notices what needs to get done and pitches in, or someone who waits to be asked?
Encouraging your athlete to arrive a few minutes early, help carry equipment, and clean up after herself, without being told, builds habits that coaches notice immediately, and that teammates come to admire and hopefully try to emulate.
Leading with Connection
The single biggest thing we watch for, especially in older athletes, is how a player treats their teammates when the ball isn't coming to them.
Do they high-five the passer after a shanked serve-receive, or turn away? Do they cheer for the sub coming off the bench, or barely acknowledge them? Do they talk to teammates between points, or retreat into themselves? Athletes who lead with connection, who make their teammates feel seen, especially after a mistake, change the emotional tone of an entire team. It's contagious in the best way, the same way negative body language is contagious in the worst way.
This matters more than people expect when we're building rosters. We're not just picking athletes who are good at volleyball; we're building a group of nine to eleven people who are going to spend four to five months together, through good matches and rough ones. An athlete who brings connection and energy to a team, even when they’re on the bench or having an off day, is incredibly valuable, sometimes just as valuable as an extra kill or dig.
Why We're Sharing This
We're not bringing this up to create pressure or to suggest that character alone earns a roster spot. Skill certainly still matters, and we've written separately about what rough skills we look for at each age group heading into tryouts. But we'd be doing families a disservice if we only ever talked about serving percentages and passing platforms.
Most of what we're describing here isn't really about volleyball at all. It's about how a young person shows up for a group of people who are counting on them, and that's a life skill long before it's a sport skill. If you're looking for something concrete to work on with your athlete before the season starts, we'd point here before we'd point to a skill drill: notice the trash, offer to help before being asked, and clap for a teammate before worrying about your own play.
