Reasons You DON’T Want to Play Volleyball

Check out the 30 Reasons You DON’T Want to Play Volleyball by USAV’s John Kessel.

1. You spend most of your time active. Wouldn’t you rather play a sport where you get to sit around most of the time like baseball, cricket or wrestling? While you get to rest a bit between points, volleyball makes all 12 people on the court move all over the place and that is just tiring! Yet you only get three in/out subs a game, not unlimited. They track the number of subs, and make half the team play with no chance of being subbed out!

2. You rarely get to hold onto the ball, you have to rebound it. That’s just not fair. Aren’t sports about catching, throwing or just simply holding onto the ball? When things aren’t correct in volleyball, you can’t just pause and figure out what to do next.

3. Every contact is judged by a referee. What do you mean the ball can’t spin when I set it? Nobody penalizes a quarterback’s touchdown throw because it wobbled too much. You can shoot a basket from anywhere around your body, but if I set or spike from too far back, it could be a fault. I am jumping in the right place and time to do it, give me a break!

4. You have to jump…a LOT. I get that jumping is part of sport, but in volleyball it’s just too tiring – to jump every time you spike AND every time you block – on basically every third contact, by both sides? You think I am a jumping bean or something? I might jump at the wrong place and time and then I will look bad.

5. You only get to touch the ball three times before you give it back. What the heck? In basketball, football and soccer, if your attack is not working, you can back out and figure out a different path. In volleyball, you’ve got three touches to work it out. You have to learn to “better the ball” by taking a bad pass and making a great set from it, or handling any kind of 2nd contact.

6. You have to win by TWO points. Most other sports let you win by just a point, or even TIE. Volleyball is too challenging as you have to win by TWO points! What’s wrong with just having the lead at the end for gosh sakes? It’s good enough for football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey so why does volleyball make it even harder?

7. There are just not enough injuries. Volleyball is just too safe a sport, and does not have enough concussions for my taste. There’s never been a death in volleyball from the action of playing? Too safe for me.

8. You have to win more than one game. It’s not good enough to win the one game…Nooooooo. Volleyball makes you win three of five, or at minimum two of three games. I’d like it more if you just have to win the first game and then you can boast of your victory.

9. You have to play offense AND defense. That is another tiring thing, no chance to just play on the offense or the defense side. You have to get good at both, along with all those unique skills like spiking, blocking and FOREARM Passing? Who has good forearm-eye coordination? That’s just too hard, not to mention it hurts my athletic arms.

10. Things come too fast and too often from too close. Listen, something coming at me at over 100 kph is not supposed to be coming from 1-7 meters away. You are at the limit of human reaction time at that distance and that makes reading before/at contact way too important. And putting up 1-3 blockers right in front of my amazing spike shot? Not fair. One opponent at the most, and preferably NONE, just like I practice. This train in reality stuff is too hard, and makes things too ugly.

11. The range of play is just too much. Volleyball players often are digging the ball just off the floor, sometimes as low as a hand’s thickness. At the same time, they are serving sky balls 20 meters in the air. The rules for indoor play (since heaven is the sky limit when playing outdoors), are the highest of any indoor sport, making architects design pop-up ceilings over the main court at the Olympic Training Center. For those places where the ceiling is lower, well, again it just gets even harder as you can play balls off the ceiling, reacting to where it rebounds (although you can’t bank a shot into your opponent’s court), which can be so confusing.

12. You can’t improve with technology, it takes your own skill to get better. I mean, come on, most sports you see technology advancements all the time, with better/bigger racquets and club heads, or lighter, more powerful carbon fiber shafts and bats. In volleyball if you are short, you can’t buy longer blocker arms, pass better with the latest serve reception platforms, set more accurately with GPS-guided ”magical” setter gloves. Nope, you have to learn how to rebound the ball with the body you were born with. That’s so not fair….

13. You can’t really STAR in volleyball. There is too much need for real teamwork and collaboration. You can’t score the winning goal or get fed all the balls and score 60 points on your shot. I want to be a star, not a team player.

14. Someone is always scoring a point. Sports are supposed to make successes hard. 0-0 soccer games, baseball and hockey games that end 1-0, and 7-0 football games. In volleyball there is a point scored on every play! All this point-scoring confuses me. Who can keep track? And then I argue about it being a point and if the officials don’t agree, I am unhappy.

15. You get to be your own cheerleader. All that fun celebrating and team bonding, point after point. I just want to cheer with my teammates every once in a while, like after a goal.

Click here to VIEW Reasons #16 – #30!

You can also check out John’s Blog Site by clicking THIS.