Killing it! Bringing some humor to the NJ Volleyball Community…

10/17/25

Imagine this scene: You’re at a packed New Jersey high school girls’ volleyball tournament. The buzzer between matches sounds, and suddenly someone hands you a microphone. “We need someone to entertain the crowd for five minutes. You look funny… why don’t you do a quick comedy set?”

Sure… what could be easier than trying to make 15-18 year old girls laugh? We figured the simplest approach would be to get up there and just crash and burn and completely humiliate ourselves. Girls always get a kick out of that, right?

That got us thinking. Volleyball is full of hilarious moments, inside jokes, and shared experiences that deserve a spotlight. So we’re asking the volleyball community to contribute to our “Comedy Set” with their best material for an “America’s Got Talent” type of two-minute claim to fame.

For all you jokers out there, here’s an opportunity to bring smiles to teammates, opponents, and fans across the state. We’ve put together our own routine below as inspiration.

Think you can do better? Of course you can!!!

We’re taking submissions for the funniest volleyball-themed jokes, stories, and one-liners that capture the true essence of high school volleyball life.Serve us back something even better! Submit your comedy gold to njpowerranking@gmail.com and the best entries will be featured in an article next weekend. Just remember to keep it appropriate for the court. The volleyball court, that is!

Here’s our attempt at volleyball stand-up.

“Stick to Stats, NJP!”

Hey everyone! So I coach high school volleyball, which is basically like herding cats if the cats were wearing knee pads and constantly taking selfies.

Our team took “game day superstitions” to a whole new level last season. It started with one player wearing mismatched socks to a game where she had 12 kills. Next thing you know, the whole team was all wearing mismatched socks. Then another player forgot breakfast but had an amazing serving streak, so half the team started fasting before morning games. By mid-season, we had a 27-step pre-game ritual that included braiding hair in specific patterns, applying exactly two strips of pre-wrap around ponytails, and standing in a precise circle formation during warmups. Our Captain had to high-five every player with her left hand only. I finally intervened when someone suggested we should all switch to using our non-dominant hands for serving “for the luck.” Not a good idea…

The team parents are a whole different universe. We have the “Stat Dad” who tracks more volleyball metrics than the Olympic Committee. This guy brings a laptop to games and hand signals his daughter throughout the match. When he first started doing this, I thought he was performing interpretive dance. Meanwhile, “Camera Mom” has taken 47,000 photos this season alone and still somehow misses every single one of her daughter’s kills.

Do any of you know that Mom that still brings orange slices to the match for all the players to eat between points. This isn’t pre-school. You know how hard it is to serve with pulp hands. In my day, we would throw a power bar in our bag and have one snack after the first set. This weekend I saw one of our players pull out an Acai bowl and a kale smoothie from her duffle. Another had a sushi roll and ended up wiping her eye after touching wasabi. Lot’s of crying that day… mostly by me.

You want to know true pain? Try explaining rotation rules to grandparents who just want to know which direction to cheer. I spent 20 minutes with our setters grandpa last week. He nodded the whole time, then turned to me and said, “So it’s like musical chairs, but nobody sits down?” Yes, that’s right!

The difference between how these girls think they look playing volleyball and how they actually look is the greatest comedy in sports. In their heads, they’re soaring through the air in perfect form, hair flowing majestically as they spike the ball with the power of Thor. Then they see the tournament photos their dads took, and they’re just blurs of limbs with mouths hanging open and faces that suggest they’re simultaneously confused, terrified, and possibly experiencing minor medical emergencies. For a Dad, those pics are worth every penny.

Team bonding is my favorite thing to watch. Last year, we had a two-hour bus ride to an out of state tournament. In that time, I witnessed the girls create an entire choreographed dance to a song I’ve never heard of, plan someone’s sweet sixteen party, collectively decide bangs were “so over,” and develop an elaborate theory about why the rival team’s setter was secretly being recruited by Stanford. Not a single word about volleyball strategy.

Team bonding is my favorite thing to watch. Last season, we had an evening to kill after dinner at a hotel lobby when one of our tourney games were cancelled. In a short time, I witnessed the girls create an entire choreographed dance to a song I’ve never heard of, plan someone’s sweet sixteen party, collectively decide bangs were “so over,” and develop an elaborate theory about why the rival team’s setter was secretly being recruited by Stanford. Not a single word about volleyball strategy. After three hours they concluded that we should “just, like, score more points than the other team.” Volleyball wisdom at its finest.

The greatest invention and destruction of coach sanity has to be the team group chat. Our team’s chat has meaningful back and forth like “Coach just posted the lineup” with 200 messages in five minutes, “Someone needs a ride to the tournament” with zero replies for two hours, and “Did anyone find my water bottle?” which somehow turns into a 3 AM philosophical discussion about colleges, boys, and life choices. Mostly boys!

The pre-game playlist battles should qualify as an Olympic sport. Last season, our team captain insisted on creating the “perfect” warmup mix. This involved a democratic voting process, a hat filled with a thousand little pieces of paper, three spreadsheets, and at least one friendship temporarily destroyed over whether Olivia Rodrigo or Taylor Swift should get more songs. Then after all that drama, our sound system broke and they had to warm up in complete silence. Of course they played their best game of the season. Now I “accidentally” smash the speakers with a sledge hammer before every big match.

But you know what? When that team steps onto the court and everything clicks… when they’re diving for impossible saves, setting up perfect attacks, and celebrating each point like they just won gold medals, there’s nothing better in the world. Even if half of them were up until 2 AM debating the superiority of middles versus outside hitters in the group chat and now look like they’re zombies running on pure adrenaline and WaWa hoagies. Now that’s volleyball!!