Mintonette on the net
by Graham Brown

...fearing loss of their subscriptions his desperate solution was to mix basketball, baseball, tennis, and handball......

BACK in 1895, in a YMCA somewhere in America basketball coach W G Morgan was faced with a class of wealthy businessmen who found his sport a little too rough for their tastes. Fearing loss of their subscriptions, his desperate solution was to mix basketball, baseball, tennis, and handball to create a brand new sport mintonette.

Soon after he was offered some good advice. An offhand remark that can perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, be seen as the equivalent of somebody politely pointing out to Messes Lennon & McCartney that maybe their new song "She really likes you." might scan better as "She Loves you Yea Yea Yea". In this case during a demonstration of his new game, someone remarked to Morgan that the players seemed to be volleying the ball back and forth over the net, and perhaps "volleyball" would be a more descriptive name for the sport. 70 years later volleyball was in the Olympic Games and now, globally, is second only to football in popularity as a participation sport.

Charlie's Story

Some 3 or 4 years ago, to find out about volleyball on the net I spoke to Charlie Orton the Regional Commission Manager of the English Volleyball Association, and a qualified referee. It soon became clear that he was the person to talk to. Armed only with a shaky new Internet account and little computing expertise (his words), he created the first volleyball site in 1994. Now that might seem like yesterday but in internet time its big bang, life in caves, flint tools yes Charlie was on CompuServe!

Charlie recalled to me the story

I was encouraged by London Chairman Jon Doyle, to go online in 1994. I took the plunge and started a Web Page for the London Association. During the following year it expanded, and started to attract hits from around the world. Then there were complaints from outside London, demanding that all the National League results were published, rather than those just involving London Clubs, resulted in my site becoming an unofficial English Volleyball webpage. I never had a hit counter on the site, so I never knew how many people were visiting it. But as I travelled around England to Volleyball matches, it seemed like every week someone was saying, "found your Web Page the other day - its great." I was receiving around 50 enquiries a month from people wanting to join clubs in London, and wrote a specific enquiry for my Database to ease the load of answering so many questions.

The real level of impact was shown at the National League meeting in April 99 when all but 4 of the 100 plus clubs present admitted to getting their results from the Website. By that time I had nearly 300 Volleyball Association members with E-mail addresses, and some 600 other on-line addresses of interested parties. Now I have links to 39 English Club web sites, and 15 Volleyball organisation sites within England, not to mention International Sites.

The use of the Web within Volleyball was emphasised recently with the latest Issue of the Rules coming from the International Federation, with E-mail notification and publication in .pdf format, long before a hard copy was received in this country

The Web site is about to change, with input from some of the younger, and more expert members of the Volleyball fraternity, I am quite happy for my site to be re-written by experts in this young field - I feel very little protective ownership of the site. My only conditions for the site are that content must be up-to-date, and that it should be of value to the membership.

Charlies story is a perfect example to use if you are thinking of putting your club or hobby online.

Another great site is the homepage of Spikeopaths Volleyball Club I spoke to Robin Scudder who does their webpage. He told me

"We've had the site for about 2 years now, and it has been very successful in attracting new members. On average we get around 20 visits a day and we have found it a good way of promoting the club and volleyball as a whole."

With a name like theirs, the Spikeopaths just had to have a fun web page! A spike in Volleyball is apparently when you push the ball up for a team-mate to smash the ball across the net. It seems that for volleyball on the net, Charlie provided the spike. And the ball has been expertly struck!

The Volleyball Newsletter

4 years on like most things on the web, things have moved on and there are now far more Volleyball resources on the web. Your first port of call should be the home page of "The Volleyball Newsletter" edited by Dave Reece, hosted on the original server which held Charlie's site, which is sent direct to 1000's of readers every fortnight. There is an archive of past newsletters and you can search this using keywords to find out if your name has been mentioned! There is a lot of news and interaction with readers via numerous letters, articles and photos. These newsletters deserve to be printed out and read over a cup of coffee they are that good, and how much internet content could you really say that about. The ball is flying out!

Volleyball Book Search

The internet is a great way to search for and to buy sports books. However it is essential to shop around. Amazon cannot be ignored but a lot of the time you will find books cheaper elsewhere. See our books page for some more sites.

A Great Sports Club Template
£10 and one day

I recently interviewed Saul Dobney of The Bath Volleyball Website (www.bathvolleyball.co.uk) and there is some useful stuff here for anyone thinking of setting up a volleyball website ... or any club website ... or any website!

The main message is to keep it simple. If you look at the front page it uses some tasteful graphics in moderation. This is not always easy to do as the tempation is always there to "improve" the page! But keeping it simple usually makes good design sense, as well as helping you to get listed on search engines. I found Bath's site high up in the powerful and popular engine google.com and this is because google, not unreasonabally, loves to see good relevant text on a page.

Another thing that comes out is that you can set up a site VERY cheaply and VERY quickly. The Bath Volleyball website was put up for £10 and in one day!

Tell me more about the site Saul:

It was set up about 2 years ago with the aim of providing a central point of information for everyone in our club, for anyone who happened to be searching around for a volleyball team in our area and for ex-players who have played with us from time to time. So we provide fixtures, match reports, photos, coaching notes and contact details.We've also had a number of visitors to Bath who have become players because they could find us on the internet.

We've focused on keeping everything as simple as possible both to minimise the amount of work in keeping it up-to-date and to keep the costs down - so there are no flashy layouts, or databases behind the scenes, or bits of animation script or style sheets. We just wanted it quick and simple both to download and for us to manage so we can keep it up-to-date without risking breaking links, having to go through redesigns every time something changed or trying to find new slots for extra bits of information.

Other sites are "prettier" but our aim has been to keep the costs and workload down to an absolute minimum. It cost just £10 for the name and web redirection service to some free web space given to me by my ISP and the simple design means we could get it up and running quickly (less than a day from start to finish). It would be very easy for other people to copy as a sort of template for a simple sports club site.

Now we have the site it's just a question of keeping it up-to-date. Club members send stuff through such as pictures and so on. If it starts to become unwieldly through volume of material then I'm sure we'll review the design, but at the moment given that time is such as precious resource for anything that relies on volunteers, simplicity is the watchword.

A Club Website Evolves

It is great when someone who is indispensable creates a website for your club or society. In fact that's the only type of person that could do the job in the early days. Not many people knew what HTML or FTP stood for and the Oxford English Dictionary was no help either.

But what happens if they leave? This will surely become a common problem as the web evolves. More and more people will find themselves looking after websites and having to learn the ropes quickly. Luckily, the web has become easier and with a little care and effort you can take on that club website you've been left!

In this interview with Ken Edwards of Chelmsford Partners we can get a feel for how it can be done.

Although the web is easier there is still work to be done! He's halfway through a night school course but is already fully taking good care of the site, having just revamped it.

The site

• www.volleyball.co.uk/chelmsford/index.htm

We start with another "google friendly" simple text page with text links on the left. The thin gradient of blue on the left gives this a little kick. A clean fresh look, without any advanced design skills on show. My only minor complaint is that maybe the text could be spiced up a bit, maybe bigger headings etc.

Guinness are not going to be ringing Ken just yet to redesign their site but who cares? The beauty of the net is that you can compete with the graphic design experts simply by keeping it very plain and simple. And the surfer will always prefer your site!

Ken's motivation for learning webdesign was merely to be able to update the data on the site. On the first page we are clearly told when the site was last updated and are presented with an excellent search facility which returns extremely targeted results. I typed in the name of one of their opponents and got one of the many interesting press reports on site. This archive must be useful for the coaches to look back on the detailed reports and scores, quickly and easily.

Tell me about the Chelmsford Partners Website Ken:

The website was started by one of our players, James Murphy who as they say has the knowledge and has been useful in that we can publish our press reports and attract new players. James also did the Essex VA site which I am currently rebuilding too, but less far advanced. James went to the US on business last year and we had trouble when we could not get in to alter things. This has been resolved and as they say its now on my desk!. My qualifications come from an on line Learning Centre web design course plus a 'night school' course which I am half way through - its a case of learn it at 1.00pm and implement at 3.00pm so its close to real time!

At the moment my plans are to ensure the new version is stable and has no glitches and keep it up to date. There will need to be some housekeeping, like checking all the links to other VB sites are still current, and I'd like to get some more team and action photos in. Longer term I'd like to put things like some of our session coaching plans, how to do a press report and generally share some of our experience with others, but as they say, first get the foundations in and fixed.

By the way www.atomz.com do an excellent free search engine for websites if you want to put one on your site.

Super Umbrella
Wiltshire Volleyball Association Site

This excellent website covers Volleyball in the Wiltshire area and is packed full of information on local clubs including news and photos.

It is a superb example of a site that provides information and support across a wide area. When individual clubs have websites - they link to them ... but for those that don't they publish details anyway - with a good high placing on the major search engines to boot. This is useful in that the clubs in the Wiltshire area have the power of the web working for them. Then as and when they can make their own sites they will be guaranteed an immediate steam of interested visitors.

But make no mistake, this is a site that has its own unique identity, with great content and a desire to improve and expand. I was particularily interested in the comment about creating more printable material (presumably pdf type documents). With the wealth of information on the web it must be a good idea to encourage visitors to print something like a list of fixtures or a training technique off. Then your site is not lost in the surf!

The site

• www.vball.org.uk
Bonus! - • Volleyball Techniques for Beginners

I asked Matthew Stevens, Wiltshire Volleyball Associations Webmaster Matthew Stevens Wiltshire Volleyball Associations Webmaster to tell me more about the site ...

The initial aim of the site was to provide online information for the Wiltshire clubs to access easily and to improve communication throughout the association as a whole. We soon realised that the site was being visited regularly by a wide range of people, not just from England. For this reason we incorporated the Basic Volleyball site to help promote and aid future volleyball players and coaches. As a result of this the site has generated a vast quantity of e-mails through people wanting to learn more about the basics of volleyball and expand and improve their techniques.

Presently the association has a wide range of material available through their site; this includes nine of the Wiltshire clubs profiles and a profile on the Mavericks, who are a Wiltshire squad that contains a ladies south-west team, a men's south-west team and a men's and a women's national team.

The future plans for this site are to have downloadable documents, for example league tables, rather than just static HTML documents. This would enable people visiting the site to easily save and print off documents at a later date. Once this stage of the site is completed the next main aim is to redesign the look and 'feel' of the site so that it captures peoples imagination.

Related pages:-
• Volleyball Sites - Listings and Reviews

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Mintonette on the net by Graham Brown

Mintonette on the net
by Graham Brown