🏐Volleyball🏐
Originally, it was named Mintonette 🤣
For a sport that has been around for over a century, the origin of
volleyball traces its roots to a rather humble beginning. History has it
that William G. Morgan, who invented the game of volleyball in 1895,
came up with the idea so that people who found basketball’s ‘bumping’ or
‘jolting’ too strenuous could have an alternative physical activity to
fall back on. William G. Morgan, who served as the physical director at
the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Holyoke, Massachusetts,
looked at the sports around and picked the aspects that he thought
suited his brief the best.
The ball came from basketball, the net from tennis and the use of hands
from handball. While this made up a game of volleyball, it was lent some
competitive tone with the introduction of innings - later to be called
sets - that was borrowed from baseball. Morgan introduced the sport --
called mintonette, the original name of volleyball -- at the YMCA
Physical Director's Conference a year later at Springfield College,
Massachusetts.
"In search of an appropriate game, tennis occurred to me, but this
required rackets, balls, a net and other equipment, so it was
eliminated, but the idea of a net seemed a good one," Morgan explained.
"We raised [the net] to a height of... just above the head of an average
man. We needed a ball and among those we tried was a basketball bladder,
but this was too light and too slow. We therefore tried the basketball
itself, which was too big and too heavy.” A new specially designed ball,
which was lighter and smaller, was introduced in 1900. Though it was
incomplete with no fixed rules and a format to follow, the sport did
enough to win over the delegation and soon became a part of YMCA’s wide
network throughout the USA with a new name - volley ball (initially it
was termed as two words).
Volleyball was officially selected to spell as a single word in 1952. A
sport that traced its origin to basketball, baseball, tennis and
handball - and now estimated to be played by over 800 million globally -
had thus been established.
Learn more about volleyball history