You might think that volleyball has only been around for 40 or 50 years. You’d be wrong – the history of volleyball actually stretches all the way back to the 19th century, and the sport has come a long way in the 120 years in between. We’re going to look at all the facts and answer the main questions about how this sport came to be in this brief history of volleyball.
History of indoor volleyball
To find out when and how volleyball was invented, we need to go all the way back to 1895, at a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) school in Holyoke, Massachusetts, USA. There, we can answer who invented volleyball – the physical education director, William G. Morgan, wanted to come up with an indoor sport that was less physical than basketball but still required a good level of fitness. It was in that very establishment that he wrote down the first rules for a game he called mintonette.
For, the structure of the game, Morgan took the ball from basketball, the idea of a net from tennis, and the use of the hands from handball to make a true hybrid sport. Volleyball had been born, but it wasn’t until a year later when the sport was presented at the Physical Director’s Conference in Springfield, Massachusetts, that Dr Alfred Halstead gave it the name we know today.
Development of volleyball rules
Of course, the original volleyball rules were quite different to the modern sport. The court was a lot smaller, but there were no limits to numbers of players or the number of times the ball could be hit up in the air. The early game consisted of 9 innings, with 3 serves per inning and the sport remained unchanged for a few years until, in 1900, volleyball’s famous inventor himself commissioned a lighter ball – the same ball that is used today.
Volleyball developed slowly over the following twenty years, with the 15-point system being introduced in 1917 and a 3-hit limit following in 1920. 1922 saw the first YMCA national championships and six years later, the first US Open was held under the jurisdiction of new governing body the United States Volleyball Association – now USA Volleyball.
Continued growth of volleyball
The sport continued to grow in America, but it was also being played abroad; the set and spike was invented in the Philippines, for example. In fact, even though we know that volleyball was invented in the US, the first World Championships in 1949 was dominated by the European nations –…