Random Volleyball Team Generator

So you drew a volleyball team

You wanted a volleyball team and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It mixes the great national sides with the professional clubs of Italy, Poland, Turkey, Brazil and Russia, on both the men's and women's sides.

The tool is the simple part. Volleyball is worth understanding because its basic architecture is unlike anything else on this site, and the difference is so obvious that people look straight past it.

Invented to be the gentle one

Volleyball was invented in 1895 by William Morgan, a YMCA instructor in Massachusetts, and he invented it as a deliberate softening. Basketball had appeared four years earlier a few miles away and had proved too strenuous for the older businessmen in his classes. Morgan wanted something with less running and no collisions, so he strung a tennis net across a hall at head height and told them to keep the ball off the floor. He called it mintonette.

The name did not survive its first demonstration, where an observer pointed out that the players were volleying, and the sport was renamed on the spot. It is worth holding onto the irony. A game designed for men who found basketball too demanding is now played by two-metre athletes who jump higher than basketball players and hit a ball harder than a tennis serve. Nothing about the modern sport is gentle, and the only original design decision that survives is the one that mattered: the net, and the rule that you may not touch the other team.

The only sport where nobody touches anybody

Think about what a net does. In football, basketball, rugby, handball and hockey, the fundamental act is contesting possession: two players want the ball and one takes it. Defence means interfering with a person.

Volleyball forbids all of that. The teams occupy separate territories and may not cross into each other's, may not touch the net, and never come within reach of one another. Possession is not contested; it is surrendered, three touches at a time, by rule. You cannot foul an opponent because you cannot reach them. What this produces is a sport that is entirely about space and timing rather than about physical contest, in which a defender is not marking a person but guessing where a ball travelling at over a hundred kilometres an hour is about to land. It also produces the sport's other peculiarity: every rally must end in a point for somebody. There is no dribbling out the clock, no keeping the ball. Somebody makes an error or somebody wins. The scoreboard moves constantly, which is why volleyball is so relentlessly watchable and so exhausting to play.

Everybody rotates through every zone

Here is the rule that shapes the sport more than any other, and that newcomers find genuinely bewildering when they first notice it. Every time a team wins the serve back, all six of its players rotate one position clockwise.

The consequence is that nobody gets to stand where they are useful. Your two-metre-tall middle blocker will, in a few rotations, find himself in the back row where he cannot attack above the net at all. Your setter, the small brilliant one, will be obliged to take a turn at the front. Teams spend enormous tactical energy on switching positions the instant the ball is served, running players across the court to where they belong, because the rules dictate where they must start but not where they must stand once the rally begins. That is why the six people on a volleyball court appear to sprint sideways at the moment of every serve. They are undoing the rotation as fast as the referee will permit.

The rule change that saved the sport

Until 1999 volleyball used side-out scoring: you could only win a point when you were serving. If you were receiving, the best you could do was win the right to serve. Two evenly matched teams could exchange the serve for twenty minutes and the scoreboard would not move at all.

This made matches of unpredictable and often absurd length, which television could not schedule and broadcasters would not buy. So the sport changed the fundamental law: now every rally scores a point for somebody, regardless of who served. Sets go to twenty-five instead of fifteen. A match has a roughly knowable duration. It is one of the most drastic rule changes any major sport has ever made to itself, it was done explicitly for the cameras, and it worked. When the tool draws you a team, if their glories are from before 1999, they were winning a measurably different game.

Nations, and the leagues where the money is

This list holds two kinds of team. The national sides meet at the Olympics, the world championship and the Nations League, and the powers are Brazil, Poland, Italy, France, the United States, Serbia, Japan, China and Turkey, with Cuba and Russia carrying long histories.

Then there are the clubs, and this is where professional volleyball actually lives. The Italian and Polish men's leagues and the Italian and Turkish women's leagues are the wealthiest in the world, and they import the best players from everywhere. A Brazilian outside hitter is quite likely to spend his career in Italy and come home only for national duty. So a random pull might give you a country or a club, and they are not competing for the same things. It also means several names on this list have changed as sponsors have come and gone, which is worth knowing before you trust any club name too far.

What a random volleyball team is good for

• Olympic and world championship sweepstakes. Draw nations for a group and follow the tournament.
• Fantasy drafts and pools. Assigning teams for a bracket or a game.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask why volleyball players sprint sideways the moment the ball is served. It is a very good question.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a club, find a match from the Italian or Polish league, and watch the rotations rather than the ball.
• Settling a debate. Pull two nations and argue the greater volleyball tradition.

Volleyball questions

Why do volleyball players rotate?

Because the rules require that every player takes a turn in every position, including serving. Teams switch back to their preferred positions as soon as the serve is struck, which is why they appear to sprint sideways at the start of every rally.

Why do volleyball sets go to twenty-five?

Because in 1999 the sport abandoned side-out scoring, under which only the serving team could score, and adopted rally scoring, where every rally produces a point. It was done to make match lengths predictable for television.

Do volleyball players ever touch their opponents?

No. The teams are separated by a net and may not cross the centre line or touch the net. Volleyball is the only major team sport in which possession is never physically contested.

Can I pull several teams, 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 keyword the entry has to contain, which is handy for separating clubs from national sides.

References

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