International Volleyball Hall of Fame: Pieter Joon, Father of Paravolley

The International Volleyball Hall of Fame inducts its 2022 class on Saturday. We are profiling all six inductees, including this feature on Pieter Joon. You can watch the ceremonies in Holyoke, Massachusetts, live at 7 p.m. Eastern. Get all the information at www.VolleyHall.org.

When you hear the phrase “a great of the sport” you probably picture a top scorer or the face of the media darling. But what if this person is a behind-the-scenes individual who literally got the entire world on the same page for the sport to actually happen. There has to be a word that is bigger than “great.”

But we certainly have an example: Pieter Joon of the Netherlands.

The Father of the Paravolley world and the man responsible for paving the way for the great success that the movement is having around the globe in all of its various disciplines.

Joon is set to become an inductee into the International Volleyball Hall of Fame, a fitting recognition that the first Para inductee into the Hall is an administrator, much like the first-ever inductee, William Morgan, the inventor of the sport.

“There is an interesting parallel here,” said Steve Bishop, President of the International Volleyball Hall of Fame and Executive Director of the Florida Region of USA Volleyball. “The majority of the inductees into the International Volleyball Hall of Fame are athletes, so it’s important that these folks who are so instrumental in that particular discipline, who were pioneers in the sport and setting it up for the coaches and athletes to come, are the first inductees in their categories.”

Joon was born in Amsterdam and contracted polio when he was only 2 and a half years old. After many months in the hospital and several surgeries, he taught himself to walk at age 13 and joined Kennemer Invaliden Sportclub (KIS) when he was a teenager. There he was introduced to the traditional sport of volleyball in a coaching and officiating capacity.

He soon began playing sitting volleyball, which had expanded around the world by the mid-1970s. While Joon made his way up within the Netherlands National Volleyball Federation and the Dutch National Federation for Disableds, he noticed that the sport was not played under a unified ruleset around the world. This, understandably, caused many frustrations when different countries played each other during international tournaments, including an event in Bonn in…