Mintonette: The Day Volleyball Was Born
On February 9, 1895, Holyoke YMCA gym director William G. Morgan invented a gentler indoor game for older athletes — and accidentally created one of the world's most-played sports.
Basketball was too rough for the older guys at the gym. So William G. Morgan invented them a whole new sport.
On February 9, 1895, Morgan — the physical education director at the YMCA in Holyoke, Massachusetts — unveiled a game he called "mintonette." It was designed to be played indoors, by any number of players, and to be far gentler than the bruising indoor games of the day, while still giving the adult men of the Y a real workout.
The timing was no accident. Just four years earlier, only about ten miles away in Springfield, James Naismith had invented basketball — and Morgan knew Naismith well. The two had met at the YMCA Training School in Springfield (now Springfield College), where Naismith had recruited Morgan to play football. Now Morgan was following his friend's inventive example, building something new out of bits of older games: a little tennis, a little handball, a dash of his own imagination.
Tennis gave him his central idea: a net. He raised it to six feet six inches — just above the head of an average man, he figured — and set his players to batting a ball back and forth over it.
The ball, though, was a problem. Morgan's players first tried a basketball bladder, but it was too light and drifted too slowly. Then they tried a basketball itself — too big, too heavy. So Morgan went to A. G. Spalding & Bros. of nearby Chicopee and asked them to build him something new: a lighter, leather-covered ball designed for the game. The first true volleyball was born.
His original rules read like a curiosity cabinet today. The net stood six feet six inches high, the court measured 25 by 50 feet, and any number of players could join. A match was played in nine innings, with three serves for each team per inning, and there was no limit to how many times a team could touch the ball before sending it over.
The game got its first public showing in 1896 at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield. Among the observers was Alfred Halstead, who noticed the game's defining action — the constant volleying of the ball back and forth — and suggested the name. "Mintonette" became "volley ball," spelled then as two words.
From YMCA gyms it spread to playgrounds, beaches, and eventually the world stage: volleyball has been an Olympic sport since the 1964 Tokyo Games. Today it is one of the most-played sports on earth, with hundreds of millions of players from school gyms to Olympic sand courts.
Not bad for a gym teacher trying to go easy on the older fellows.
Photo: Otto M. Jones, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
