by Nick Frontera

Created on: July 05, 2009

In the eighth month of the eighth year of the new millennium, we all sat around our television sets anxiously, watching the men's beach volleyball tournament unfold. We watched, holding our breaths, as Dalhauser and Rogers coalesce as a two-man team, blocking, spiking, and serving that volleyball. When the tension was over, the two were gold medalists for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

How in the first place did volleyball even become an Olympic sport? It started in the Paris 1924 Summer Olympics, where the game was not yet an official sport recognized by the Olympics Committee. The game of volleying the ball was simply a demonstration at the summer games, where Americans made an event of showing the world the game of volleyball. After these demonstrations, people though out the globe began recognizing the game as an official sport, and was an official game in the 1964 Summer Olympics.

There was a flaw, however, in the scoring. It was basically each team faced all the other teams and they were ranked by wins, set average, and point average. Towards the end of each game, winners could already be determined because teams couldn't make up for their poor playing in previous games; it was impossible to increase your set average from a previous game to change the outcome of the current game. Audiences would quickly loose interest for the game because they would know the winner long before the game was even over, making it difficult to enjoy the game.

A new plan must be quickly devised, and was to spark greater interests in the games. The elimination style we still know today was made up. You would face a team, and if you won, you would advance to the quarter finals, then to the semi finals, then the finals. If you lost, you were booted out of the competition, and thus a fresh start for both teams as they advanced closer to their goal. Your previous games could not make future games defective any longer. This elimination been in effect since the 1972 games and is still like that. It is crazy to think it was different back in the day.

Volleyball was an instant success. It started off as only about a team from each continent, but rapidly more countries hopped on the wagon of the growing love for the game. The game started with a great beginning, and is still just as popular as it captures the hearts of millions in the world. When the next Olympiad starts up, take time to watch this sport with the same passion that people have already been doing for nearly a century.

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