My daughter has done travel volleyball since after 8th grade. Prior to that she did 2-3 different sports at a school or Rec level and was athletic and tall enough to stay a school starter. If she did not do travel volleyball, there is zero chance she would still be on the high school volleyball team. She does not have the height to be a premier player and was a JV starter (MVP) as a junior while playing as a sub in half of varsity sets.

We have found a somewhat happy medium where she is on a regional travel team. This is a core of 7 girls from the middle school she went to with 3-4 new players each year. Max travel is 4 hours, with just 2 practices per week. None of these girls plan to play in college, but most are varsity players/starters- just not stars on their HS teams. We have seen various nice girls fall by the wayside as they just aren't good enough to even make regional travel teams. Our overall club has roughly 150 girls tryout for 5 teams of 12 each year, so there are a lot of girls that want to play volleyball and can't even get on travel teams. That said- our regional team would be competitive with the "2/3" (out of 5) level teams at the main club. When we play the 4/5 level teams we totally blow them out. It isn't even competitive. But there are still another 90 girls at every age level that want to play and aren't even good enough to make the 'bad' teams. I'm not sure this is travel volleyballs' fault. Something much earlier in elementary or middle school did not happen to give them basic coordination or skill. My daughter did rec volleyball from 4th-8th grade. I was the lightly qualified coach. Girls would come in as 7th graders and sometimes never even touched a volleyball. That already was hard to get them competitive with people who at least had done rec league as younger kids.

The premier travel teams practice 3-4 times per week and have at least 3 tournaments a year that would involve flying. We are in Nashville and they'll go to Philly, Minneapolis, Chicago. Their program cost is about $4k, whereas our regional travel team is less than $2k.