The International Volleyball Hall of Fame inducts its 2022 class on Saturday. We are profiling all six inductees, including this feature on Peter Murphy. You can watch the ceremonies in Holyoke, Massachusetts, live at 7 p.m. Eastern. Get all the information at www.VolleyHall.org.
Revolutionary. If there was a word to describe the impact that Dutch leader Peter Murphy has had on the sport of volleyball and team sports in general, that would be it.
“Peter Murphy had a great influence on both of the men’s and women’s Netherlands volleyball programs for so long,” said former USA women’s volleyball coach Terry Liskevych. “He is known for spreading coaching education and technical knowledge throughout the world in his several decades of work on the technical and coaches commissioners of the FIVB.”
Murphy was born in Canada but grew up in the Netherlands from the age of 5, and is regarded in the international sports world as an expert, teacher and speaker in the field of high performance sports, coaching and team building.
He began his volleyball career as a player and moved into both coaching and physiotherapy. He was the physiotherapist for the Dutch National Men’s volleyball team at the 1970 World Championships and moved into the coaching role for the next several years for both men’s and women’s teams.
It was in this role that Murphy and Liskevych initially met.
“I met Peter in the mid-1980s when I was coaching the USA women’s team and he was advising the Netherlands men’s program before he became the coach of the women’s team,” said Liskevych. “They became very competitive internationally on the women’s side and they had many excellent teams.”
In 1986 Murphy took on another role, serving as the Technical Director of the Dutch Volleyball Association, where he was involved in the development of the famous “Bankrasmodel” concept. This concept, which means “uncompromising pursuit of a high sports goal”, would eventually bring world fame to the Dutch men’s volleyball team.
Some of the highest-profile results include an Olympic Silver Medal in 1992 under head coach and 1995 International Volleyball Hall of Fame inductee Arie Selinger and ultimately Olympic Gold in 1996 under head coach and 2014 International Volleyball Hall of Fame inductee Joop Alberda.
During the men’s team’s run of success, Murphy stepped into the head coaching role for the women’s team, earning a silver medal at…
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