Introducing the new BB rating and session

Hello CBVA Community,

We’re six weekends into our 2025-2026 indoor season! In just the first four weekends alone, we had 2,000 Saturday and Sunday session hours played by 274 unique players. I’d like to take this opportunity, on behalf of the ratings committee chairs and the rest of the CBVA board, to introduce and explain the new BB rating and the resulting uprates of 104 people, with 50 of those ultimately getting access to a new, higher-level session. I’ll also walk you through some data that shows how our restricted membership roll-out is influencing  our goal of offering as many level-appropriate volleyball opportunities as possible in a supportive, LGBTQ+ space.

How did the first four weekends go?

Short answer: pretty well!

The longer answer involves some data. In these first four weekends, we had 274 unique players (including non-member guests), which is notably fewer than the number of memberships we’ve sold so far (322).

You can view the granular player-session-level data from the first four weekends here.

What have we done?

We’ve added more granularity to our spectrum of ratings by introducing BB, sandwiched between A and B. The ratings committee chairs then looked at the highest-rated C and B-level players and uprated using the new criteria for C, B, and BB that we’ve updated on the Ratings page. Here is a more detailed view of what changed:

(Note: the figures above are based on the first 300 memberships sold)

Why did we do this?

We want to maximize level-appropriate volleyball in a supportive, LGBTQ+ space. We’ve made great progress on the latter with Early Access—234 of our 322 members have Early Access!—but the former is a constantly moving target. This year, as with years prior, we’ve had a disproportionately high number of players in a relatively tight band of the rating spectrum (B/C). 

We were fortunate enough to be able to expand our permit on Sundays this season and add another 2-hour session. Adding another C session was a straightforward, low-effort decision for us based on the membership numbers, but this was imprecise and didn’t address the need for equitable amounts of level-appropriate playtime across all ratings. 

After a lot of deliberation, we decided to split B and C (30-69) from two into three ratings (still spanning the 30-69 ratings spectrum). The reality is, we’re still a bottom-weighted league: 70% of members are 0-59 (D-B) and only 30% are 60+ (BB or above). With these recent changes, we feel more confident that the Sunday sessions are now closer to their respective “true” rating-appropriate levels of play. But this doesn’t bring much relief to what is still a sizable number of B- and C-rated players who want more opportunities to play volleyball at a level of play that is higher than their current rating. We see this play out in the notably lower utilization of C sessions by C-level players compared with higher-level sessions. (In other words, C-level members are less likely to play in C session than any other rating level is likely to play in their respective session.)

Unfortunately we will always have to wrestle with a difficult-to-reconcile tension between wanting to play at a higher level than one’s rating and not wanting to play down. Level-appropriate play ensures a certain skill floor and establishes standards for play experience. There are just not enough higher-level players (30% of our league) to “play down” to raise the level of play for the other 70% of the league.

What other concerns are we hearing or noticing?

• Sessions are not consistently filling up.

• We don’t like that either. Across the board, we’re at about 73% utilization of our Saturday and Sunday court space. While we’re mindful that competition for sessions consistently increases over the course of a season and peaks in the winter months, we still plan to open up more memberships soon. Check the Memberships page for details.
• Sunday A/AA: This has historically been hard to fill but it’s been looking better! We’ll continue to keep memberships open for anyone rated A/AA.
• Sunday C: Filling only 68% of our C capacity says we probably need to open up memberships to this rating in case it’s contributing to the lower turnout, though we may wait a week or two to see how BB, B, and C sessions look after the recent ratings changes. Sign up for membership opening updates here.
• Saturday 3: This has always been tough to fill. Capacity is generally only 30 people with clinics frequently running on Court 3, and the mid-afternoon Saturday time slot isn’t super appealing. We want to continue experimenting with new formats that are oriented toward the most urgent community needs (more play opportunities for certain skill levels, player development opportunities, maybe even women’s height nets or more). We’ve sent out a survey asking for suggestions on what we can do to improve Saturday 3 utilization and have already gotten dozens of great responses. If you haven’t already, please consider submitting your own ideas here!

• Buying a membership, and membership availability in general, feels confusing and arbitrary.

• This is totally understandable. In the 2024-2025 season, we introduced Early Access as a way to restrict session signups in some ways. But the 2025-2026 season is the first season with restrictions placed on memberships. We’re trying to walk a thin line between over-selling memberships (which unfairly and unreasonably dilutes the value of our $45 memberships) and under-selling memberships (which risks leaving our limited gym capacity underutilized). We don’t want to return to sessions filling out within mere seconds, but we also don’t want to leave gym capacity on the table.
• We created this centralized Memberships page to serve as a single source of truth for whether, when, and to whom CBVA memberships are available.

• There are not enough opportunities to improve my volleyball skills.

• This has been improved for many, but constrained for some, after these BB changes. We offer CBVA clinics, some of which are specifically for mid-level players. Saturday open sessions are a great opportunity for some to play at a higher level. Similarly, newly varied CBVA Tournament formats that ran very successfully last season, continuing into this season, offer even more opportunities for people to play at a higher level. We’ll keep trying to offer more of these opportunities.

• I want to know more about the board’s decision-making process.

• The board is the biggest and most active it’s been in recent memory. We’re not a monolith; we’re a diverse group of players from throughout the league. The recent changes to ratings and Sunday session structures were decisions made and reviewed by the entire board.
• We’re still finding ways to communicate more effectively with the league. Hopefully you’ve noticed and appreciate the increased emails via TeamArrange and blog posts on cbvolleyball.net as we try to reduce our historical dependency on Facebook for information dissemination.

You can always reach out to the board with questions or feedback by emailing info [at] cbvolleyball.net. We do our best to incorporate our personal experiences and perspectives with direct feedback to inform our decisions and then explain those decisions transparently.