It’s a safe bet that most people know the game of volleyball and may have even played it a time or two. After all, the game has been around in some form for over 100 years. Volleyball was invented in 1895 by William Morgan, a Massachusetts YMCA director, as “a light exercise for older businessmen during their lunch break,” explains sports and sports historian Joan Paul. That same year, at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, physical education professor Clara Gregory Baer patented her own game — Newcomb Ball — and, as Paul theorizes, “proves it may have been the blueprint for William Morgan’s volleyball game.”
The Newcomb ball was designed to “provide activity and skill development for young women who have had limited opportunities to play sports”. Baer’s commitment to providing these opportunities has been central to her work. She had completed a physical education course and after graduating took a job at Newcomb. While teaching there, she also accepted the position of women’s gymnastics director at the Southern Athletic Club. In 1889, the all-male club began allowing members’ female relatives to use the club for a few hours a week. And before Baer came along, “women reportedly preferred gossip to physical activity.”
The club thought that hiring a woman to teach the women would encourage participation, and they were right. She later took on other teaching assignments throughout the South during the summers, teaching “her progressive ideas about education and sports for women.”
Baer developed the Newcomb ball during the 1893-94 academic year while waiting for basketball hoops to be ordered.
Among her many accomplishments at Newcomb was the establishment of physical education certifications and undergraduate programs—the first in the South. She also published the first rules for women’s basketball in the United States. And somehow she found time to invent a whole new sport. She developed the Newcomb ball during the 1893-94 academic year while waiting for basketball hoops to be ordered. The rules were simple: one team threw the ball into the other’s penalty area with so much skill and force “that the ball touched the ground without being caught”. Baer viewed the game as developing skills that would come in handy when the baskets came, but found her students loved it and kept it as part of her curriculum even after they arrived.
And what about Morgan?
As Paul explains, Baer’s two-year lead means Morgan likely knew about Newcomb Ball. Baer also presented it at a national convention — one that Morgan also attended. “Similarities of early volleyball rules to Newcomb Rules are evident”, similar court boundaries; Rule changes based on gender, age and court size; and that “players tried to drop the ball on the ground before it was played.” Despite these parallels, all that remains is “keep going[d] its development as a competitive sport to this day.” Although Baer never accused Morgan of anything, Paul notes that volleyball “was not part of their curriculum until the 1923-24 school year [it] has been a popular sport for almost 30 years.”
Paul explains that there are many probable reasons why the Newcomb ball never became everything that volleyball did – gender expectations, the difference in difficulty between the two and its invention by and popularity with women, “the game as ‘feminine “to stereotype”. Of course, notes Paul, the similarities could just be coincidental, but that Baer and her sport fell into the “lost” or “little-known” categories only adds to the “lack of historical information on women’s contribution to sport and physical education.” at .”
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By: Joan Paul
Journal of Sport History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 165-174
University of Illinois Press
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