Random Volleyball Player Generator

So the tool gave you a volleyball player

You wanted a volleyball player and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It spans the men's and women's games, the great national-team careers and the club professionals, from the 1980s to the current era.

The tool is the simple part. Volleyball rewards knowing about its players specifically, because it is one of the most rigidly specialised team sports in existence, and if you cannot tell the roles apart you are watching six people apparently doing the same thing.

Five jobs, five different people

A volleyball team is five distinct professions sharing a court, and each is a different physical proposition.

The setter is the brain, and takes the second of the three permitted touches, delivering the ball for somebody else to hit. It is the most skilled position and the one that most rewards intelligence over height. The outside hitter attacks from the left and receives serve, and is the workhorse. The opposite attacks from the right, usually the biggest hitter on the team and often the highest paid. The middle blocker is enormous, patrols the centre of the net and lives in a world of quick attacks and reading the setter's hands. And then there is the libero, who is the reason this page exists.

The player in the wrong shirt

Watch any volleyball match and you will notice one player wearing a different colour to their teammates. Newcomers assume it is a captain, or a goalkeeper. It is neither, and the rules governing that person are the strangest in the sport.

The libero, introduced in 1998, is a defensive specialist. They may not block, or attempt to block. They may not complete an attack hit on a ball that is entirely above the height of the net. Serving rules vary between competitions. They exist to receive serve and to dig the opponent's spikes off the floor, and they substitute in and out freely without counting against the team's substitutions, which is why the rules make them wear a contrasting shirt: so the officials can see at a glance who is not allowed to do anything.

The position was invented because volleyball had become a sport for giants, and the rally was dying: a two-metre-tall middle blocker cannot dig a ball travelling at speed off his shoelaces. So the sport created a place for a short, quick, brave person whose only job is to keep the ball off the floor. The libero is a rule change wearing a jersey, and the best of them are the reason long rallies exist at all.

What a spike actually does

The number that explains elite volleyball is this: a top men's attacker strikes the ball at well over a hundred kilometres an hour, from about three and a half metres in the air, across a net nine metres wide, at defenders standing a few metres away.

Nobody has time to react to that. The dig you see on television is not a reaction; it was a decision made before the hitter's hand touched the ball, based on his approach angle, his shoulder, and the set. Defenders play the odds and the geometry. It is why blocking is a reading skill rather than a jumping one, and why the very best middle blockers appear to be standing precisely where the ball is going to be, having guessed the setter's intention from the position of her wrists. And the vertical jump involved is astonishing: elite hitters reach a metre or more above the top of a net that is already taller than they are. Draw a player from this list and the first thing worth looking up is the height of their reach.

The only free shot in the sport

Every rally begins with the one moment in volleyball when a player is entirely unopposed: the serve. Nobody is blocking, nobody is defending, and the server has as long as they like to prepare. It is the only uncontested action in the game, and elite players have turned it into a weapon rather than a formality.

The jump serve is a full attacking spike executed from behind the baseline, nine metres further back than a normal attack, struck with the server's whole body in the air. It arrives at speeds comparable to a tennis serve and is aimed at the seam between two receivers, or directly at the weakest passer's shoulder. The alternative is the float serve, hit flat and without spin so that the ball wobbles unpredictably in the air, in the manner of a knuckleball. A great server can win three or four points in a row without any teammate touching the ball, and can equally lose them, because a served ball that hits the net is an immediate point for the opposition. It is the sport's purest risk.

Gold indoors and gold on sand

One name on this list has done something nobody else has managed. Karch Kiraly won Olympic gold with the United States indoor team in 1984, and again in 1988, and then, when beach volleyball entered the Olympic programme in 1996, he won that too.

Consider how unlikely this is. Indoor volleyball is a six-person specialist sport in which he was an outside hitter with defined responsibilities. Beach volleyball is two people covering a court with no substitutions, no positions, no libero and no hiding, played on sand that ruins any indoor player's footwork within minutes, in wind. He is the only person to hold Olympic gold in both. He then became a hugely successful coach. If you are looking for the strongest single answer to the question of who the greatest volleyball player of all time is, his name is the one that requires the least argument, and he sits at the top of this list.

What a random volleyball player is good for

• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask what the differently coloured shirt means. Almost nobody outside the sport knows.
• Coaching and club prompts. Draw a player as a technique to study or a career to talk about with a squad.
• Olympic sweepstakes. Draw players for a group during the Games.
• Settling a debate. Pull two players and argue the greater career, across roles that cannot really be compared.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a name, find a match, and watch only the libero for one set.

Player questions

Why is one volleyball player wearing a different shirt?

That is the libero, a defensive specialist introduced in 1998. They cannot block and cannot attack a ball above net height, and serving rules vary by competition. The contrasting shirt lets officials identify them instantly.

What are the volleyball positions?

Setter, outside hitter, opposite, middle blocker and libero. Each is a genuinely different job requiring a different body, from the tall middle blocker to the short, quick libero.

Who is the greatest volleyball player?

Karch Kiraly has the strongest claim. He won Olympic gold indoors in 1984 and 1988 and then again on the beach in 1996, and he remains the only person to have won Olympic titles in both forms of the sport.

Can I pull several players, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. Fédération Internationale de Volleyball. fivb.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, volleyball. britannica.com