Originally known as “mintonette”, volleyball was born from an idea of the American William G. Morgan, who had the idea for the new sport on February 9, 1895.
As a student at Springfield College in Massachusetts, he befriended basketball-created-and-froze-the-ebro/” title=”The great wave of cold that basketball created and froze the Ebro”>James Naismith who, in 1891, invented basketball himself. Upon graduation, Morgan became a physical education teacher at the Young Man’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Holyoke, Massachusets, and it was there that he came up with his new sport, designed to be a combination of basketball, baseball, tennis and hand ball.
Morgan wanted his sport to offer a less physically intense and demanding alternative to Naismith’s basketball that would appeal to a much wider range of ages and physical abilities. Describing his early experiments, he said: “In search of an appropriate game, tennis came to mind, but this required rackets, balls, a net and other equipment, so it was eliminated, but the idea of a net. it looked good.We raised it to a height of about 6 feet 6 inches [1,98 metri] off the ground, just above the head of an average man. We needed a ball and among the ones we tried, the basketball one was too big and too heavy ”.
It wasn’t until 1900 that a specially designed, lighter and smaller ball was devised, which opened up a whole new range of tactical and technical possibilities for the sport. In the years that followed, the rules of the sport were further refined and standardized. In 1917 the scoring system per game was changed from 21 to 15 points, while in 1920 the rule was established that required a maximum of three touches per team.
Up until the early 1930s volleyball was mostly a game of leisure and recreation and there were only a few international activities and competitions. There were different rules of the game in various parts of the world; however, national leagues were played in many countries (for example, in Eastern Europe where the level of play had reached a notable standard).
The sport took a huge step forward in 1947 with the creation of the Federation Internationale De Volley-Ball (FIVB). Two years later, the inaugural World Championships took place in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Volleyball made its Olympic debut in Tokyo 1964, with the USSR winning men’s gold and the host nation winning the women’s competition.
Beach volleyball, which originated on California beaches in 1930, had to wait until 1996 to be included in the Olympic program and helped take the sport’s global reach and popularity to a new level.
