ACOG - Volleyball - IBM

History of Volleyball

Originating in the northeastern United States in 1895, volleyball developed out of the need for an indoor game to play during the cold New England winters.

An instructor at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Holyoke, Massachusetts, William C. Morgan created the new game as a less-strenuous alternative to basketball, another Massachusetts-derived game created four years earlier.

To keep local businessmen active, Morgan stretched a tennis net across an indoor court, used an inflated basketball bladder for a ball, made up a few rules and called the game "mintonette."

Although the game promptly became known as volleyball, the rules of the game have changed very little. Spikes now travel over 100 miles per hour and the "non-strenuous" game is filled with acrobatic leaps and diving digs, but six players still make up a team and the object of the game remains the same.

Quickly spread around the world by the international YMCA movement, volleyball formed its international federation, the Federation Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB), in 1947 and has since become the sporting world's largest governing body with more than 200 member nations.

Volleyball became an official medal sport at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The former Soviet Union leads the Olympic medal count with 12 followed by Japan with eight and the United States with five.

This is an official publication of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games Sports Publication Department. Written by Howard Thomas.


Olympic Factoid
Pin trading was one of the most popular Olympic sports, with more than 1.2 million pins changing hands during the Games in the Coca Cola Pin Trading Center at Centennial Olympic Park.