We have a fantastic collection in the Woodson of intramural records. For many years all the teams and results were kept in scrapbooks, some of them complete with action photos. I’ve used them fairly often, sometimes for scholarly purposes and other time to dig for material to tease my friends with.
One thing in them that still has me curious is a sport I’d never heard of before, volleywall ball. I was really baffled by it for quite a while and then I found a copy of the rules in someone’s scrapbook. Now I’m only slightly baffled.
I don’t know if this was just a Rice thing or if it ever spread beyond campus. Neither am I sure when it started or how long it survived or if it indeed still does. (I doubt it, but who knows.) The scrapbooks go up until the late 1960s and it was still around then. It sounds, frankly, like a blast.
Bonus: There’s a little Christmas tree in the back of the library, decorated with scraps of paper that have people’s wishes written on them. They’re pretty interesting.
I remember playing volleywallball in the 70s. Crazy game.
Yes to John’s comment. I thought it was unique to Rice PE classes.
The modern version
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallyball
Kenny
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Someone needs to add the Rice info to that Wikipedia article!
We played volleywallball in PE in 1975-76. My guess is that they didn’t have enough indooor space for multiple PE classes to be inside when it was 39º and raining in January, so they invented a volleyball variant to play in the raquetball/handball courts. Pretty clever, really. And fun.
I’ll fourth that. Best use of a handball court after racquetball.
I’m guessing that Melissa has a regular blank blog entry set up which begins with “We have a fantastic collection in the Woodson of…”
The Google does seem to indicate that it is a predominately Rice Thing. It is mentioned at other universities but I’ll bet it was actually “carried” by Rice alums. I remember hearing the term when I was at Rice in the early 80s and it was just another one of those intramural sports.
You should Google the more common name “wallyball” rather than “volleywallball” — you will see a much different perspective.
Volleywallball was an interesting game.
The angles one could obtain off the side walls and at the wall junctures took much getting used to.
And balls up high enough, that everyone had missed, would come back at one again, sometimes to the back of the head, if one was inattentive.
I’m NOT sure whether a ball could be bounced off the side and back walls of one’s one half-court, but I think they could — note the printed rule forbidding that on the serve, however.
The only out of bounds was the ceiling, and above the red lines on the back walls.
It was a fascinating game, especially if one made the mistake of playing against some ot the varsity basketball players. (That was also true for regular volleyball, against the likes of Gene Swinger, Joe Durrengerger, Don Lance, etc. Some of the football players were no slouches either.)
Gene Pratt nailed it. Add Temple Tucker, King Hill, Fred Woods, and some other basketball players to that list and it made one want a face mask. Amazing that someone thought to put flat stainless receptacles at half court that would accept the net hooks. I played handball at UT for many years and they added many new courts and none of them had that feature. It’s a terrific game and should be added to the Olympics.
The game is called wallyball in most of the country and is certainly not unique to Rice. There is even a national governing body (American Wallyball Associtaion). The name “volleywallball” may be pretty Rice- specific,but the game is not.
I remember playing volleywallball/wallyball in PE at Rice in 1991. Dr. Jimmy Disch said something about the game having been invented at Rice, but not sure if that’s really true.
I’m not sure that wallyball is the same as volleywallball. The American Wallyball Association seems to think their game was invented in the 70s. I’m pretty sure that we were told that volleywallball was invented at Rice, but whether that was just local legend, I have no idea. That it was played as far back as the 1950s suggests it predates wallyball, at least.
I played “VolleyWallball” sometime in the years 1952-56, at Rice Institute.
Does anybody whether the game had been played at Rice OR anywhere else earlier than that?
Should have been “Does anybody KNOW whether the game had been played at Rice OR …”
Sorry about that: The Clute/Klute discusson has unnerved me somewhat.
In the 60s, volleywallball was so popular that regular volleyball was mostly an afterthought, and played pretty much irregularly. And unless you have faced the likes of Kendall Rhine in this game, you have no idea what “helpless” really means.
Do the courts in the new rec center have the hooks for playing volleywallball?
I played volleywallball in volleyball PE class in 1984.