It may seem as if I’m neglecting this site, but actually I’m compiling a list of rules for the game of Volleyball. It will include FIVB rules, as well as differences for each level. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and have never seen elsewhere. Mostly because every volleyball site out there copies the “basic rules” page from one another.

I have, however, been talking to a gentlemen from Belgium about the state of men’s volleyball there and globally.  His insights have helped me understand the differences from Europe to the United States. One thing he says is that volleyball really isn’t exciting to watch because people just don’t understand the actual height of the net, the power and speed of the ball and the reflexes needed to be good at Volleyball… Until they watch a game in person. So I decided to research and write about it.

Now, volleyball isn’t that prevalent on TV in the US unless it involves athletic women on the beach in little bikinis. But when a good indoor game is on TV, most casual people would watch it for a few minutes and flip the channel. TV distorts the value of being there. Here are some points that I’ve researched to help explain to someone why volleyball is just as exciting as other sports:

Height of the volleyball net

In men’s volleyball, the height of the net is  7 feet and 11-5/8 inches. To some, that may not seem that high, but when you put up a chart showing some other sports and the height of the average American male, you can see that it is nothing to really laugh about.

The height of the volleyball net is really just a starting point. Because hitters and blockers must reach at least a ball length, and more than that if they want to be good players, above the net. In fact, most of the time, the action in volleyball occurs at around 8 1/2 to 9 feet.

Conditioning

In order to jump so high, good players are in tremendous condition, despite what many may think. Perform an exercise if you disagree:

• Place two markers on the floor, 10 feet apart, with one 4 inches off the wall and the other away from the wall to form a “T” with the wall.
• Place another marker at 8 1/2 ft high.

Now,

1. Run back and forth between the two markers on the floor.
2. Jump up at the wall, pike your body, and touch the marker on the wall.
3. If you hit the wall with any part of your body, restart this set.
4. Repeat this 4 times, about the average rally length during a high school boys match.

Tired yet? No? Well, now that you have done 1 set, do 350 more of them resting for 10 seconds in between each. This is how many times a volleyball player transitions off the net and prepares to block/hit during a 5 set match. Harder than you thought? I thought so… and that doesn’t even come close to exactly what a volleyball players does during a match, you need coordination to actually hit a volleyball while you are physically tired.

Speed of a Volleyball

Another thing TV does is make the action look slower. Many rookies in professional football say that they are surprised by the “Speed” of the game. That is because the TV makes the game look slow. Only when you actually see the game do you realize that it is faster than it looks on TV. Multiply it by 10 and you might get an idea of how fast it is as a player. The same thing goes for volleyball.

I’ve made another small chart, can you tell I like them?

As you can see, a spiked volleyball is middle of the pack as far as speed when compared to most other ball sports. But there is one very big difference. No other sport is played from one player (setter) to another (hitter), which is expected to create a high velocity attack without an apparatus of some sort, hockey stick, tennis racket, or baseball bat.

Also, with the relatively small size of the volleyball court compared to the other sports listed and you can see the defenders of a hard driven spike have a very short reaction time-frame. I would say it is somewhere around a tenth of a second. Granted, a good player can “guess” where a shot is going by the hitter’s body language, but the velocity and angle is only truly determined on the hitter’s contact with the ball. It would be a little more than a baseball catcher having to catch a foul tip off of a baseball bat, straight back toward the umpire’s face.

In the End

The simple fact is that TV makes all sports look easy. Players don’t look tall in sports on TV because there is no reference point. Balls don’t look very fast because the camera is, most of the time, above the crowd and a few hundred feet back from the action.

My point of this article? Support your local volleyball team, whether it be high school, college, club or national team. Go see a game, try to sit at net level. I challenge you to leave that gymnasium, stadium, or arena with same attitude about the sport that you had when you walked in.

Footnote: You may have noticed that I used High School heights and Professional speeds. That is because high school speeds are not usually clocked in many sports. The only research I found available is those of Pro sports. If you want to get a good average of high school athletes, subtract about 10 to 20 MPH from each number.