Volleyball - More Than A Century Old And Still Popular

What is Volleyball? If you don't know the answer of this question then you must be an alien living in a far away planet in outer space. Besides other great team sports like Basketball and Soccer, Volleyball is also considered to be one of the most famous sports in the world. For more than a century, this sport has gone through many kinds of improvements that makes it becomes an interesting sport as we can see today, in fact the name of the sport is also included in those changes.

The volleyball history began in Holyoke, Massachusetts in the year of 1895 when it was invented by the education director of YMCA William G Morgan. Only four years before that in the Springfield YMCA, one of his colleague James Naismith just introduced a new sport called Basketball, which then encouraged Morgan to come up with the invention of Volleyball. Basketball is a fast paced sport that caught a lot of people's attention, it didn't take very long for this new sport to become very popular in the USA, but the problem is not everyone can play this game especially middle aged people that could not keep up with the fast paced of the game, and that's what motivated Morgan to create a new sport that can be played by people of all ages called "Mintonette".

The name "Mintonette" was chosen because this game was actually borrowing several aspects of Badminton, Mintonete was played on a square court using a 6ft 6inch net similar to Badminton. At the beginning, this game was played with a very simple rule, the number of players in a team are not limited as long as they can fit on their half of the court, then both teams just need to "volley" the ball until one of the teams failed to hit the ball. After a while finally the name was changed into "Volleyball" according to the way the game was played by volleying the ball back and forth, I have to say that this is one of the best improvements of the game, I mean can you imagine watching a game called Mintonette on a Summer Olympic?.

Some modifications to the game like maximum three touch rules, changes of the nets height and court measurement, the numbers of the players which were limited to six for each team, player rotation, including the scoring system made this sport became more interesting and challenging, thus more people began to play this game and volleyball became more and more popular. Various kinds of new technique followed the improvements of the volleyball rules, these new techniques including spiking, setting, and different styles of serve mostly developed by younger players and these great improvements even made Volleyball more popular amongst young people. During the world war I the US troops introduced this game all across Europe, while in Asia this game was usually played in the US missionary schools and didn't take very long to make Volleyball game spread across Asian regions.

The next important stage in the history of Volleyball game was the forming of several most important Volleyball organizations, started by The United States Volleyball Association in 1928 and The Federation Internationale de Volley-Ball (FIVB) in 1947, with the existence of these organizations world class competitions were able to be held, started with Men's World Championship in Czechoslovakia in 1949 then The International Competition in 1950s in Rusia. Volleyball is a very fun game and great to be played for relaxing with friends, and that's exactly what the people on the Coast of California do during their holiday at the beach, they played the game on the sand with a little modification on the rules to adapt to the environment, but this later on became the starting point of a whole new sport called Beach Volleyball, and California Coast will always be remembered as the birth place of this game in the Beach Volleyball history. These days we can see people playing Volleyball or Beach Volleyball even in the most remote areas all across the world, and after these games were finally became the official sport of the Summer Olympics they became even more popular.