WHY DID YOU START CORE VALUES?
The answer to this comes in several parts. I have been coaching volleyball for just about 15 years, starting as an unofficial "assistant coach" my junior year in high school for a boys club team that our JV coach started. My senior year of high school I suffered a serious knee injury and thought that my days of playing volleyball were over. I knew at that time that I had to continue coaching to share my passion for the sport. Even back in high school I knew that eventually I wanted to start my own club.
Fast forward a few years and I started as the Head Coach for the City of Golden CARA Volleyball program. Over the next few years I worked with some great kids and parents. As the kids approached high school age the parents usually came to me and asked about club volleyball. I would give them the names of some local places, they'd go to a camp or visit during a practice, and some would even tryout and make a team..... but they'd come back to the CARA program. They were having some awful experiences and wanted an environment where their kids could be more competitive than CARA, but still be able to enjoy volleyball and life outside of it. Traditional club programs can be very grueling and cause a lot of stress on the athlete and family. Stress coming in the form of school work failing because of spending too much time at the gym, confidence failing because of a coach that acts like a drill sergeant and is demeaning to players, and a HUGE financial stress with parents sometimes paying over $4000 for a season of volleyball. The more I heard the stories and the struggles, the more I knew I HAD to try to help these kids and their families have a positive volleyball experience.
If you've read the "About Us" section of our website, then you also know that I wouldn't have had the opportunity to play club volleyball if not for my high school coaches, Tim and Wayne Trotter. They were the factor that made club volleyball possible for me and some of my teammates coming from families that lived paycheck-to-paycheck or were below the poverty level. Because they had access to local school gyms, and because they just had big hearts and wanted to see us play, they were able to create this low-cost option... when listing to our CARA parents I often thought to myself, "if they could do it, so can I".
At the end of 2013 I started looking into starting my own club.... but wholly cow.... everything was so expensive! I learned quickly the value that the Trotters had provided. It took me several months, lots of credit card debt and countless hours, but I soon found everything I needed to get a club running. The last thing I needed was a club name. There are a lot of good, strong club names. There are over 100 clubs in Colorado alone, and wouldn't you know most of the names that popped into my head were already on that list. I spent a lot of time thinking about what the goals of the club would be, what impression do I want people to have when they see our name, what impression did I want to leave on our athletes? My past and the things that drove me to success kept coming into play... and then one day in random conversation with my boyfriend at the time I said something along the lines of "I really want this to align with my core values"... and well, there you have it... Core Values VBC was born.
I am proud to say that three years in I believe that Core Values VBC and its athletes have a strong future ahead. I believe in teaching confidence so kids don't feel like I did growing up; I believe in teaching discipline so kids understand when it's time to focus and when it's okay to relax a little and just have fun; I believe in teaching determination because I never want a kid not to achieve their goals just because they gave up. When we start our season I try to stress these three "core values", and at the end of every practice, the beginning and end of every tournament we say "To the Core" as a reminder that it's not just about growth in volleyball, but life.
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