Some ideas to help make a volleyball team at my school?

[VB Coach]

I don't know whether your private high school has to conform to Title IX standards, but you should check into that ASAP. Get the head counts and participation rates for boys and girls at your school. You may have to talk some other coaches (such as football and baseball) into taking fewer players so that there's enough head count left over to form a boys team.

I tried for several years to get a boys team started at the high school where I coached the girls for years, and kept running into a blockade set up by the athletic director. He had declared that frosh/soph football and baseball were no-cut sports, so there would be 100 boys on the football team, mostly standing around doing nothing. Same on the baseball team -- there were 25-30 boys on the frosh/soph squad, and about 10 of them never got any playing time at all during the season.

To have a varsity and JV boys volleyball program, we needed room for 20-24 boys, and the AD was unwilling to make any cuts at all to those programs. I hope you don't run into that same kind of resistance.

You should also develop a budget, and come up with some fund-raising ideas. To get a new sport started, you'll have to budget for uniforms and some training equipment (volleyballs, carts, Vertimax, that sort of thing). As the season goes on, you'll have to pay for referees and for transportation to away matches and tournaments. In our league, the budget per player for the girls team during a season when we don't buy new uniforms is about $140 per player, which covers refs, tournament entry fees, and bus rides to away matches. (We have 3 teams and a total of 40-42 girls.)

Anyway, if you have all of this thought out, and you present it to your athletic director and principal, you will really help your cause. I wish you the best of luck because I'd love to see men's indoor volleyball come back as a major sport.