Origins
Volleyball is a pretty well know sport all around the world, it’s even in the Olympic Games! Around 800 million people play and thus know this sport inside and out. It’s origins can be traced back to basketball, baseball, tennis and handball, so where does this popular sport actually come from?
In 1895 William G. Morgan was thinking of a sport the business men of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) could play. Some of the men didn’t like the physical contact and impact from the, also newly invented, sport Basketball, but did want to play a sport with each other. As the physical director of the YMCA, Morgan had to think of a way he could fix this. As he was very inventive, he grabbed the things he liked from other sports and combined them together to make a whole new sport. It was called mintonette.
At first he liked tennis as a sport, but for that he needed a lot of other equipment so he got rid of that idea. But he did like the net and thought it would be of good use for his newly thought of sport. He also needed the ball from basketball, and the usage of hands from handball. To make the sport more competitive, he later added the use of innings (later called sets) from baseball.
When he introduced the game to a conference for physical directors, it didn’t have any fixed rules, but everyone thought it was a good idea and soon it would become a part of the YMCA’s network that spread all throughout the USA. This time with the name volley ball.
Because the YMCA had a large network and had societies all over the regions of India, China, Europe, South-America and Africa, the game soon went global. It first got popular in Asia as it was included in the first Far-Eastern Games in 1913. By this point, there were still no fixed set of rules for everyone to follow. They were further refined by this point, but the rules all varied from region to region. What was a good development though, was the design of a specialized ball in 1900. The bladder of a basketball was too light, but the whole basketball was too heavy. This design was smaller and lighter than a basketball, but heavier than the bladder and soon was used everywhere for the sport. When a new set and spike tactic was invented in the Philippines in 1916, the rules developed further, but until 1947 there were still no rules set for this sport.
All of that changed when in April 1947 the Federation Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) was established. Fourteen different nations all gathered to make and distribute the set rules of volleyball, which had now merged to one word. Paul Libaud was the first president of the FIVB until 1984. They organized the first World Championships for men in 1949 in Prague and for women in 1952 in Moscow.
As the sport became more and more famous and gathered a lot more players, it got granted Olympic status in 1957. The first debut volleyball got in the Olympic Games was in the Tokyo Games in 1964 where homeland Japan won. Since volleyball has been a part of the Olympic’s, Brazil has been the country with the most gold medals for this sport with 12 medals total.
Since the beginnings of this game, volleyball has now gained over 800 million players worldwide with people of all ages enjoying it in a professional or recreational way.
