The history of volleyball can be traced back to 1895 in Massachusetts, USA, where William G. Morgan, a physical director of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), invented the game of volleyball as an indoor sport for businessmen who found basketball too vigorous. The game was originally called "mintonette" until a professor from Springfield College in Massachusetts proposed the name "volleyball" due to the volleying nature of play. The original rules were written by Morgan and printed in the first edition of the Official Handbook of the Athletic League of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of North America in 1897. Over the next 20 years, rules were set into place, and a specially designed ball came to be by 1900.
In the early 1900s, volleyball was mostly a game of leisure and recreation, and there were only a few international activities and competitions. In 1916, the YMCA managed to induce the powerful National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to publish its rules and a series of articles, contributing to the rapid growth of volleyball among young college students. In 1918, the number of players per team was limited to six, and in 1922, the maximum number of authorized contacts with the ball was fixed at three.
During World War I, American troops introduced volleyball to Europe, and national organizations were formed. In the 1920s, Japan, Russia, and the United States each started national volleyball associations. In 1947, the Fédération Internationale de Volley Ball (FIVB) was organized in Paris and moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1984. In 1949, the initial World Championships were held in Prague, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) made the game a non-Olympic sport.
Beach volleyball, a variation of the game, was included in the Olympic program for the Atlanta Games in 1996, which helped take the global reach and popularity of the sport to a new level. Today, there are more than 800 million volleyball players worldwide, 46 million of them in the U.S. .
