I recently joined a volleyball league. So here’s a blog about volleyball!
Firstly, volleyball’s first name wasn’t volleyball. The sport was named Mintonette, by a man named William G. Morgan in 1895 [1]. William wanted a sport that could be played by people of all ages that didn’t require as much effort as some of the other popular sports in that day in age. Basketball was a bit too rough for the older generations and he liked the idea and rules of tennis, but tennis required too many items to play (drawn court, rackets, ball). Morgan liked the idea of a net and ran with just that to create a new idea. He had a new ball designed, and created the first set of rules for volleyball!
The rules have changed a LOT since William first created the game.
In sand volleyball, when the ball first enters your side of the net you can only hit the ball three times before returning it to the other side of the net. It wasn’t always this way, when the game was first created you could hit the ball as many times as you wanted before returning it to the other side. Another interesting fact about the old set of volleyball rules is that if you hit the ball to the other side of the net you could run onto the other side and return the ball to your team if the trajectory of the ball was headed out of bounds.
In today’s volleyball ruleset the most common types of hits are the set, bump, volley and spike, or more modernly called pass, set and kill (or hit) [2]. When the ball is first hit to your side you want to slow down the ball with a bump. After the ball is controlled you want to volley it into a “spikable” position. Then Spike the ball onto the other side!
There are many ways to improve your individual and team-based volleyball skills. There are couple drills I like to run for individual ball control. The first involves circling up 3 or more people and simply hitting the ball to one another, the key here is one foot has to stay planted. This drill will help improve the accuracy of your hits and help you understand and fine-tune how the ball reacts when it hits different parts of your arm. Another drill I like to do is simply stopping a fast aggressive serve. Stopping a serve with a bump hit can be very difficult especially because you want to control the ball’s trajectory to set up a volley. In this drill, one person who can perform an aggressive serve is on one side of the net, and the others are on the other side. The server serves the ball and the others have three hits to stop adjust and spike the ball to the other side.
There are plenty of other drills that can help increase your skills in volleyball, but simply getting out and playing a couple games is great practice as well!
References
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