Volleyball was created in 1895

On 9 February 1895, William G. Morgan created a game called Mintonette, which later came to be referred as volleyball.

For a sport that has been around for over a century, the origin of volleyball traces its roots to a rather humble beginning.

History has it that William G. Morgan, who invented the game of volleyball in 1895, came up with the idea so that people who found basketball’s ‘bumping’ or ‘jolting’ too strenuous could have an alternative physical activity to fall back on.

William G. Morgan, who served as the physical director at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Holyoke, Massachusetts, looked at the sports around and picked the aspects that he thought suited his brief the best.

The ball came from baske`tball, the net from tennis and the use of hands from handball. While this made up a game of volleyball, it was lent some competitive tone with the introduction of innings - later to be called sets - that was borrowed from baseball.

Morgan introduced the sport -- called mintonette, the original name of volleyball -- at the YMCA Physical Director's Conference a year later at Springfield College, Massachusetts.

"In search of an appropriate game, tennis occurred to me, but this required rackets, balls, a net and other equipment, so it was eliminated, but the idea of a net seemed a good one," Morgan explained. "We raised [the net] to a height of... just above the head of an average man. We needed a ball and among those we tried was a basketball bladder, but this was too light and too slow. We therefore tried the basketball itself, which was too big and too heavy.”

A new specially designed ball, which was lighter and smaller, was introduced in 1900.

Though it was incomplete with no fixed rules and a format to follow, the sport did enough to win over the delegation and soon became a part of YMCA’s wide network throughout the USA with a new name - volley ball (initially it was termed as two words). Volleyball was officially selected to spell as a single word in 1952.

A sport that traced its origin to basketball, baseball, tennis and handball - and now estimated to be played by over 800 million globally - had thus been established.