Serve. Pass. Set. Attack.
89 entries across 15 topics, plus a 40‑term glossary: rules, positions, skills, formations, equipment, training, beach volleyball, competitions, notable players, coaching, officiating, variants and culture.
A team sport played by two sides of six players separated by a net, where each team tries to ground the ball on the opponent's court while keeping it alive on its own side for no more than three touches.
Win rallies by legally grounding the ball on the opponent's court or forcing an opponent error, and be the first team to win three sets (indoor) or two sets (beach).
Almost every rally follows the same three-contact shape — an underhand forearm pass, an overhead set, and an attack — repeated back and forth until someone errs or a ball goes down.
An indoor court is 18 by 9 meters, split by a net set at 2.43 m for men and 2.24 m for women, with a 3-meter attack line marking the front zone on each side.
Low equipment cost, adjustable difficulty from backyard to Olympic level, and a rally structure that rewards teamwork over individual size have made volleyball one of the most-played team sports on Earth.
Same net, same basic skills, different game: beach volleyball is played two on two on a smaller sand court to 21 points, with no substitutions and every touch won on skill rather than depth of roster.
On February 9, 1895, YMCA physical instructor William G. Morgan invented a new net game he called Mintonette at the Holyoke, Massachusetts YMCA — the game that would be renamed volleyball within the year.
The earliest version of volleyball had no set number of players, no attack line and unlimited contacts — the three-touch rule, the rotation system and a fixed six-player lineup all arrived over the following decades.
YMCA missionaries and American servicemen carried volleyball to Asia, Europe and South America within a generation of its invention, and it took root especially quickly in the Philippines, Japan, Eastern Europe and Brazil.
Volleyball entered the Olympic program at the 1964 Tokyo Games with both men's and women's tournaments, and host nation Japan's women's team — the celebrated 'Oriental Witches' — won gold in the sport's first Olympic final.
Volleyball was scored strictly by side-out for most of the twentieth century — only the serving team could score — until the FIVB adopted rally point scoring in 1999, awarding a point on every serve and reshaping the pace of the sport.
From a niche YMCA pastime to a global professional sport with year-round international tours, dedicated television deals and a growing analytics industry, volleyball's competitive landscape has expanded dramatically since the late twentieth century.
Every rally awards exactly one point to the team that wins it, whether or not that team served — the system that has governed every set of top-level volleyball since 1999.