What do you think of this fact?
Today, volleyball spikes slam over the net hard enough to make you flinch. But the sport started out as pretty much the opposite: a gentle alternative to basketball for businessmen, under the name “Mintonette”.
Basketball was too rough for the gentlemen
In 1895, William G. Morgan was a 25-year-old gym teacher at the YMCA in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Just down the road in Springfield, basketball had been invented four years earlier, and it was spreading like wildfire.
Morgan’s problem: his gym was also used by middle-aged businessmen who didn’t move around much otherwise. For them, basketball was too strenuous and involved too much physical contact. So Morgan put together a game of his own. According to Olympics.com, the ball came from basketball, the net from tennis and the use of hands from handball.
The ball took some trial and error. Among other things, Morgan tried the rubber bladder of a basketball, but it was too light and too slow. A ball designed specially for the sport only arrived in 1900.
Nine innings and unlimited touches
The first rules of “Mintonette” look pretty strange today. The net hung at 6 feet 6 inches, just under two meters. A match had nine innings, a bit like baseball, and each team served three times per inning.
How often could a team touch the ball before sending it over? As often as it liked. There was no set team size either. The rule allowing at most three touches per side only came in 1920.
A spectator comes up with a better name
In 1896, Morgan took a demonstration team to the YMCA in Springfield. A spectator noticed that the players seemed to be volleying the ball back and forth the whole time. The suggestion: “volleyball” would make a good name. Morgan agreed, and “Mintonette” was history.
At first the name was written as two words, “volley ball”. It was only in 1952 that “volleyball” was officially settled on as a single word.
Through the YMCA network, the game soon reached other countries. In 1964, volleyball made its Olympic debut in Tokyo, and beach volleyball followed in 1996 in Atlanta. Today it is estimated that over 800 million people play it.
Not bad for a game that was only supposed to go easy on a few desk-bound businessmen.