Watching the Volleyball matches in the Olympics, I have a few rule questions.
Scoring: Whenever I have played volleyball, a team only wins points when it has the serve, and when it wins a volley when it is not serving, it merely gets the serve back. In the Olympics the teams seem to score whenever they win a volley, whether they are serving or not. Have the rules changed?
Three Hits: I thought that each side got a maximum of three touches on the ball before it had to go over to the other side. In the Olympics, it appears that a team will sometimes have four touches (particularly when they go up for a block, it deflects off their hands and there are three touches after that). What’s up?
Off-Color Player: What is the function of the player on each team has who wears a uniform that is an opposing color to the uniforms of the other players on the team?
It’s called “rally scoring” and was a rule change to speed up play. An unfortunate change in my view, I loved the long rally’s that would go on and on trading side-outs until one team got a good rotation that let them score.
A block doesn’t count as a ‘touch’ for some reason. As far as I know, this rule has always been in effect, or at least, this is the way I’ve always played.
It’s a new position called the libero, the result of another rule change. They are not allowed to spike or serve the ball, and I’m not sure if they’re allowed to set either. They are passing/defensive specialists.
addendum: A block doesn’t count as a “touch” for the purposes of the three-hit rule, but it DOES count as a “touch” for the purposes of out-of-bounds. Go figure.
This has been a rule for a long time, since at least the mid 70s when I learned how to play and probably long before that. I think the main reason is that if it’s blocked well, the ball is likely to go straight down, where the only person who could possibly play it is the person who blocked it. If the block is considered a hit, then no one could play it. So the team would be penalized for executing a good block. To avoid this, they make a block be a non-hit. It’s considered a touch because the blocker has modified the trajectory of the spike, so that a ball that was headed inbounds may land out of bounds. This is not the spiker’s fault, so they make a block a touch by the blocker’s team.
One change I noticed was that they played a net serve. Anyone know what the rule is on this? Are all net serves played or only some?
It was done either in conjunction with, or in response to the change to rally scoring, else every time the ball ticked the net, the serving team loses a point.
I would add that the rules you saw in force at the Olympics are only used in international play. If you go to a college or high school match, you will see the “old” rules: games to 15, side outs except in the fifth game, and no libero.
Indoor volleyball modified its rules in an attempt to keep up with beach volleyball’s popularity. In today’s short attention span, 3 1/2 hour long volleyball matches, just didn’t cut it.
So if I understand the rules creating the libero, basically it’s a rule change that exempts defensive substitutions from the normal restrictions on substitutions…? Is that the easiest way to accomplish that? Why not just liberalize the rules on substitutions to begin with?
I haven’t followed our womens’ team very much this season, so I’m not positive, but I don’t think there is such a position in womens’ collegiate vball yet.
I noticed that the USA rules had an additional restriction to the libero. In USA rules, the libero can’t set with an overhand pass from the front court. This restriction doesn’t seen to be in the International rules. Anyone know why the difference?