Volleyball Created

On February ninth, eighteen ninety five, one of the fastest growing sports in America today was created at a YMCA by William G. Morgan. That game is known as volleyball, and here's the story behind its creation. Welcome to Daily sports History. I'm Ethan Reese, your guide to a rapid deep dive into sports history. Every day. Volleyball wasn't always the high flying, fast paced game we know. In fact, it was actually created as at calmer gay to basketball and is actually intertwined with the creator, doctor James Naismith, who created basketball a few years earlier. William Moore was in school near Springfield, Massachusetts, and James Naismith, the creator of basketball, was the directors at the YMCA at the time in Springfield. To developed a friendship, and Naysmith actually encouraged Morgan to go into education and uses athletic skills to help him his drink. So Morgan went to the YMCA training school in Massachusetts in Springs, where he participated on the football team, and then he took a place as the physical director at the Hodio YMCA in eighteen ninety five. One of the tasks he was given was to develop an activity for the men that were a little bit older and couldn't handle the riggers that basketball was giving. Basketball had grown in popularities in the last few years, but it required a lot of physical touching, jumping, and running into each other as they played, and a lot of the older men in the area were struggling to keep up but still wanted to be active. So Morgan took from all the sports he could think of. He grabbed a neck from tennis, the ball from basketball, and took the structure of the points in timing system from baseball, using innings in three strikes or three drops of the ball. And he even contacted a friend he had at Spaulding, a local sporting good manufacturer in the area, to develop a special ball. It was a little bit lighter and easier to use than the basketball, and he first called the game min Ota, but later when he introduced the game at the YMCA conference, the director of the YMCA liked the game but suggested we just call it volleyball, as the ball was being volleyed back and forth like in tennis, and so they changed the name and it stuck and helped grow his popularity across not even the United States, but across the world. In nineteen twenty eight there was the formation of the United States Volleyball Association, and by nineteen sixty four it made us debut at the Tokyo Games and the sport has continued to evolve as the first net was put at six feet six inches tall, has been raised since and they elimined them amount of players as in the beginning players could all play no matter than numbers. Now we have six players at a time. The ball can only be hit three times and it doesn't go against the wall or anything like that, which was allowed back in the beginning of the game. Anyone could play and you didn't score point till the ball hit the ground. It didn't matter how many times you had to hit it. And the game has developed, including adaptations like beach volleyball, which is played on a smaller court on stand and played with less people only to play on the Olympic Beach Volleyball competition. It has grown in such popularity that in August of twenty twenty three, a record was set for the largest attendance for a volleyball game at ninety two thousand in Nebraska. It's amazing how this game is intersected with basketball as there was a relationship between the two creators, and the relationships between basketball and volleyball as they are normally played on the same court. Thank you for listening to the day's Daily Sports History. If you like this, please rate, review wherever you're listening. We'd love to hear from you how you're enjoying the show. And come back to morrow for more daily sports history.