Volleyball
team sport

Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team's court under organized rules. It has been part of the official program of the Summer Olympic Games since Tokyo 1964. Beach volleyball was introduced to the program at the Atlanta 1996 Summer Olympics. The adapted version of volleyball at the Summer Paralympic Games is sitting volleyball.
Volleyball was invented in 1895 by the American educator William G. Morgan, a YMCA physical education director in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Morgan intended the game, which he originally called "mintonette", to be an alternative to basketball that was less physically demanding. It spread rapidly through YMCA networks in the United States and abroad. An international governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB), was established in 1947, and the sport grew into a global phenomenon. Its social history has included diverse communities such as Christian members of the YMCA, nudists and, more recently, debates over inclusion and fairness regarding transgender athletes.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Volleyball” as team sport. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1734. The Library of Congress control number is sh85144299. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1996, 1895 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Volleyball” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.