All About Volleyball
By Lela S. <3
Volleyball is one of the world’s most popular sports, with 800 million people playing at least once a week (including me, starting now)! This article will tell you all about this famous sport, how it was created, and how it’s played.
The game of volleyball was invented in the winter of 1895, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, by William G. Morgan, a physical education director at a YMCA. He combined parts of various sports such as badminton, tennis, basketball, football, baseball, and handball to make a new sport which didn’t have as much physical contact as basketball, and that could be played indoors.
This sport was named mintonette, a name derived from the name of badminton. Soon afterwards, the game quickly became known as volleyball (it was originally spelled as two words: "volley ball").
Back then, the rules of volleyball were very different. The game simply called for a 6 feet 6 inches tall net (an idea borrowed from tennis), a 25 x 50 feet court, and any number of players. There were nine innings per game, with three outs per innning. There was also no limit on the number of hits of the ball on each side of the court. Now, the rules are a lot different. Here is a list of the basic rules:
There are two teams of six players divided by a net.
One team starts as the receiving team, and the other team is the serving team.
The object of the game is to send the ball over the net so that the opposing team cannot return the ball or prevent it from hitting the ground in their court.
Each team has three hits to attempt to return the ball to the other team’s court, by attacking.
The ball is put in play by a serve that is hit by the server over the net to the opponent.
When the receiving team wins a volley, or round, it gains the right to serve, and the players rotate one position clockwise.
When the serving team wins a volley, it wins a point and the right to continue serving.
The ball must clear the net on a serve.
A game is played to 21 points or some other agreed upon number. The team that wins the best two out of three games wins the match.
Five famous female volleyball players:
Gabrielle Reece
Kerri Walsh Jennings
Francesca Piccinini
Jaqueline Carvalho
April Ross
Sources:
Playing volleyball. Kidzworld. (2020, July 13). https://www.kidzworld.com/article/4963-playing-volleyball/.
Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, August 17). Volleyball. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volleyball.
Comments