Officiating Basics

I want to invite our coaches, parents and players to think about officiating. Volleyball is a pretty simple game but some of the rules can be pretty confusing with parents new to the sport, especially when judgment is a factor in how the rules are applied.  Officiating can be intimidating for coaches as well because they are expected to get everything right. USA Volleyball has a lot of great resources to learn more about officiating and how the rules are applied.  Go to http://www.volleyballreftraining.com/ for more information.

We would like to invite parents to participate in our scorekeeper clinics, especially if you are a chaperone. If you attend the clinic with your daughter, it will allow us to have you help during a team’s officiating assignment and that can allow our players to get a rest or bite of food. 

Tryout Tip #4 - Playing up an age level.

Spokane Sky’s policy is that we want to have strong teams at each age group and so we only allow players to play up under specific circumstances. We understand that there is some status in playing outside one’s age group but playing up has some costs that parents may not consider. For most players, they lose the opportunity to be the dominant player that others look to on a team. If you are always playing up and you are never the go-to player on a team then you don’t have the ability to train to that kind pressure. Players who play up may not have as many opportunities to make the errors that are necessary for technical growth nor may they have the playtime that they would at age level.

While our policy is that players don’t play up we do offer some exceptions. The most common exception is that of level of experience. If your daughter is a U13 player by birthdate and she wants to tryout for our U14 team, she would have had to play U13 or U14 the last club season. For a U15 player to tryout for our U16 team she would have had to play high school varsity as a freshman 

Our policy does allow players to try out with their peer group. What this means is that we would allow a 7^th grader to try out for U13 even if her true age group by birthdate was U12.

The only other reason why a player can play up is if she is unable to play at her age level because of WIAA restrictions of the coaching staff. The WIAA does not allow players to play club for coaches in their middle or high school programs.

If there are questions on this policy just contact Mark Springer at Spokane Sky.