We needed a ball and among those we tried was a basketball bladder, but this was too light and too slow. 'In search of an appropriate game, tennis occurred to me, but this required rackets, balls, a net and other equipment, so it was eliminated, but the idea of a net seemed a good one,' Morgan explained. Morgan introduced the sport - called mintonette, the original name of volleyball - at the YMCA Physical Director's Conference a year later at Springfield College, Massachusetts.

While this made up a game of volleyball, it was lent some competitive tone with the introduction of innings - later to be called sets - that was borrowed from baseball. The ball came from baske`tball, the net from tennis and the use of hands from handball. Morgan, who served as the physical director at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Holyoke, Massachusetts, looked at the sports around and picked the aspects that he thought suited his brief the best.

Morgan, who invented the game of volleyball in 1895, came up with the idea so that people who found basketball’s ‘bumping’ or ‘jolting’ too strenuous could have an alternative physical activity to fall back on.

For a sport that has been around for over a century, the origin of volleyball traces its roots to a rather humble beginning.

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