You don't forget the smell of a gym the week of tryouts — floor wax, nervous sweat, and the squeak of every pair of shoes that came before yours. For a high school volleyball player, tryouts weren't a formality. They were cuts day, the one day the sport stopped being about the game and became about who got to stay. I'm a former player now, years removed from those three days of drills, but I can still close my eyes and hear the coach's clipboard clack when she walked the gym deciding. If you made it through high school volleyball cuts day, you already know the truth of it: friendship got tested first, long before your serve ever did.
The Walk to the Gym Door
Every August, the ritual started the same way. You'd wake up too early, eat something you weren't hungry for, and spend the whole ride to school with your stomach doing something that felt a lot like a jump serve gone wrong. The gym door was the hard part. On the other side of it was everything you wanted — and the very real chance you'd be told you couldn't have it.
I remember standing in the parking lot with my two best friends, all three of us pretending we weren't terrified. We'd joke about it, the way you do when you're trying to shrink something big down to a manageable size. "It's just volleyball," someone would say. But it was never just volleyball. It was the thing that made us feel like ourselves.
High school volleyball has a way of making you feel seen, even when you're just one girl in a long line of girls hoping for a spot on the court. That's why cuts day carried so much weight. It wasn't a roster. It was a verdict on where you belonged.
Why Cuts Day Hits Different in Volleyball
Here's what makes volleyball unique among team sports, and it's the reason tryouts felt so brutal. Only six players are on the floor at once. Six. In a sport with six people, there is nowhere to hide. Every player touches the ball, every rotation depends on the next, and one weak link changes the whole shape of the game. Volleyball has always been a game of coordination — the setter reads the pass, the hitter reads the set, the libero anchors the back row so everyone else can fly. You can't carry a teammate the way you can in some sports. You have to be woven together.
That's why coaches watch tryouts the way they do. They aren't just grading your approach jump or your float serve. They're watching whether you talk, whether you celebrate someone else's dig, whether you make the players around you better. In volleyball, chemistry isn't a nice-to-have. It's the skill being tested.
And that's the part that stung. Because when you love a group of girls the way volleyball teammates love each other, cuts day feels less like an evaluation and more like a break-up — with the team, and with the version of yourself you were trying to become.
The List
The actual moment of cuts day is seared in for any former player. For us, it wasn't a dramatic scene from a movie. It was a piece of paper taped to the gym door, or a coach standing at center court with a clipboard and a serious face, reading names while we all held our breath.
You scan for your own name first — that's just survival. But then, in the same heartbeat, you scan for your friends. That's the part nobody warns you about. You find your name, feel the rush of relief, and then you look down the list and realize hers isn't there. And suddenly making the team doesn't feel like winning. It feels like the first day of something being different.
Some girls cried quietly against the bleachers. Some hugged the ones who made it and meant it. Some walked out fast, like if they moved quickly enough the ache wouldn't catch them. Every one of them was brave in a way the rest of us didn't have to be that day.
What We Were Really Trying Out For
If you ask a former volleyball player what tryouts were about, she'll tell you it was never really about a starting spot. It was about belonging. It was about the locker room before the match, the bus rides home with your head against the window, the inside jokes that made no sense to anyone else, the way your team became a second family before your first family even knew it.
That's the ache cuts day leaves behind. Losing a roster spot is one thing. Losing the place where you were known — where someone passed you the ball and trusted you'd handle it — is something else entirely. We weren't trying out for a sport. We were trying out for a home.
The sisterhood of volleyball is a real thing, and it doesn't end when the season does. It lives in the group chats that stay active for years, in the reunions, in the way you still call each other by your jersey numbers when you're thirty-five. Cuts day could test that friendship, but it could never quite break it. The girls who stayed with you stayed for good.
Bring the Feeling Back
If you're a former player reading this, you already know what I'm going to say next: there's a way to keep that feeling close, and it doesn't require a time machine or a return to the gym at six in the morning.
We built a way to put your volleyball days back on your shoulders. You can make a custom volleyball jersey with your name, your number, and your colors — the ones you wore when you proved yourself, when you belonged to something bigger than yourself. The colors are printed so they never crack, peel, or fade, because this isn't a shirt you're meant to outgrow. It's a keepsake.
Start with the volleyball jersey page to see what's possible, and when you're ready, jump into the design wizard and build it yourself. It's $79.99, flat — one price, no games, no pressure. Just your team, your memories, and a jersey that finally honors the girl who made the cut, or the one who taught the rest of us what courage looks like on a hard day.
Cuts day tested our friendships first. But the friendships that survived it are the ones we carry for life. And now there's a jersey for that.
