There are more than eight hundred million people playing the game of volleyball today, but the sport was not always this popular. When volleyball first became a collegiate sport, the competition was scattered. Teams would form only through the efforts of interested students and coaches and many times would disperse when the interested students graduated. Volleyball is a team net sport, and the object of the game is to keep the ball from hitting the ground or keep a "volley" going. Volleyball, which originated in 1895 in the United States, is just beginning to gain popularity here in the U.S.
             Volleyball has a very interesting history since it was originally developed as non-contact recreation for older businessmen, and now it is one of the most popular sports in the world. William G. Morgan invented the game of volleyball in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1895, which he originally dubbed "Mintonette." He was the Director of Physical Education at the YMCA in Holyoke where he developed exercises and sports classes for male adults. He decided that he needed a competitive, yet the recreational game with less violence and less intensity than basketball, which was just beginning to develop at the time. Thus the game of volleyball was invented. Morgan used a tennis net and raised it six and a half feet above the ground for the player to volley over. The first actual game was played on July 7, 1896, at Springfield College. Four years later, a special ball was designed for the sport. Players in the Philippines devised an offensive style to pass the ball high to make it more easily hit by another teammate which we now call the set and the spike. If the ball dropped after the hit, they called it a "bomba," or kill, and the player who hit the ball was called the "bomberino." The next year the game was changed from twenty-one points to fifteen points. In 1920, two very important rules were implemented, the rule that allowed only three hits per side an...