![]() ![]() Interest is growing, and now boys/men’s volleyball is among the fastest growing sports in the U.S. The push to make boys and men’s volleyball more widespread started only recently. The West Coast and parts of the Midwest also were bastions of the boys and men’s game. Penn State men’s coach Mark Pavlik, who played at Derry Area High School in suburban Pittsburgh in the 1970s, said Pennsylvania has a sanctioned high-school volleyball championship that pre-dates World War II. There remained regional pockets where boys volleyball was popular. Boys are not embarrassed to play like they might have been generations ago, right? They go out there, and they have fun, and now they’re looking to find places to play. Jamie Davis, the CEO of USA volleyball, said: “What we find is that stigma is gone, that volleyball is a girls sport. “I just think a lot of boys who might have thought about the sport ran away from it in the ’80s and ’90s because it became associated with, ‘Oh, that’s a girls sport.’ ” ![]() “So (volleyball) just became identified with girls in the United States,” DeBoer said. By the 1980s, DeBoer said, there were five times as many girls high-school volleyball players as boys players. Then came Title IX (1972), and as schools rushed to provide more athletics opportunities for girls, volleyball was among the sports most often added. But there was a time, AVCA executive director Kathy DeBoer noted, in the late 1960s when boys volleyball players across the U.S. Men’s volleyball coach Alan Knipe of Long Beach Stateįor the better part of the past four decades, boys volleyball and men’s volleyball have been afterthoughts. And you have an opportunity to have these incredible athletes who are great students, great ambassadors for your university and future Olympians.” Athletic directors, invest in this sport.… It’s not a big price tag. “What I’d say to the universities, especially to the ones who are thinking about having men’s volleyball, is the sport is blowing up at the junior level.
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