Unlike many other sports, volleyball recruiting often focuses on club volleyball. For sports like football and track and field, club often plays a less important role than high school. While you do not need to go to a top volleyball high school to play collegiate volleyball, it is interesting to look at the high schools collegiate players come from. More than 5,000 high schools have had at least one graduate go on to play Division I volleyball from 2013-2023. The distribution of which high schools are sending athletes off to collegiate volleyball is not even, however, as some schools produce many more recruits than others.
Across the past decade, there have been 148 high schools that have sent, on average, at least one of their graduates to play DI volleyball every year (including my high school, Notre Dame Academy in Los Angeles!). Since we are looking at the average across a decade, this could mean that a school sends 5 kids to play DI volleyball in a year, and then sends no one for the next few years, and they would still have an average of over 1 girl going DI a year. If you know your volleyball hotspots in the country, you will not be surprised at where most of these high schools are–California, Texas, and the Midwest. I have made maps for all 148 of these high schools and where they send their volleyball athletes to DI colleges, so go take a look!
The map below shows the top Division I volleyball player-producing high schools in the country, with every dot representing a different high school. As you can see, many of the top volleyball player-producing high schools are in Texas, California, and Illinois.
Let’s take a closer look at the top schools! Here are the twenty schools that have produced the most DI players over the past decade–these twenty schools each graduate an average of more than two future DI volleyball players each year.
There are nine schools from California on the top twenty list: Archbishop Mitty, Cathedral Catholic, La Costa Canyon, Long Beach Poly, Marymount, Mater Dei, Mira Costa, Santa Margarita, and Torrey Pines.
There are five schools from Texas: Allen, Carroll, Coppell, Hebron, and Plano West.
There are two from Hawai’i (Kamehama – Kapalama and Punahou), two from Kentucky (Assumption and Sacred Heart), one from Illinois (Benet), and one from Michigan (Mercy).
The high school that produces the most DI volleyball recruits a year, by a substantial margin, is Assumption High School in Kentucky — the only school in my dataset from which an average of more than five future D1 volleyball players graduated each year over the past decade! So while, as many people know, the state that produce the most DI volleyball players is California, followed by Texas and Illinois, it is worth taking a closer look at all the schools producing great volleyball players.