Men's volleyball pushing to make sport more accessible, appealing to Black athletes

After the Penn State men’s volleyball team’s season-opening victory over Central State, players from both teams exchanged customary handshakes and high-fives. The Nittany Lions’ Toby Ezeonu, however, hung around the court a little longer to mingle with Central State’s players.

To the athletes from the fledgling Division II program, Ezeonu must have seemed larger than life. Literally and figuratively. At 6-foot-7 and able to touch 12 feet, 3 inches, the junior is one of the top middle hitters in the nation, having earned honorable mention All-American honors from the American Volleyball Coaches Association last season.

Truth be told, Ezeonu was just as eager to meet Central State’s players. Ezeonu, who is Black — his parents emigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria — sees few players of color on the volleyball court.

But Central State, a historically Black school in Wilberforce, Ohio, has a roster made up of mostly Black and Latino players. For Ezeonu, seeing such a diverse roster was refreshing.

“I took pictures with all those guys after the game,” Ezeonu said. “They were kind of happy to see me. I was happy to see them, too.”

There is a push across the nation to increase volleyball participation for males. Organizations such as First Point Volleyball Foundation are helping to facilitate efforts to grow the game for boys and men at all levels. A major component of that aim is making the game more visible and available to minorities.

According to NCAA data from 2022, only 8% of men’s volleyball players across all three divisions were Black.

“Just like anything else, there’s a saying that you can’t be it unless you see it,” said Carlow men’s coach Val Pennington, who played volleyball at former City League power Peabody. “If young, minority boys don’t see other minorities playing it, they’re going to think that it’s not a place for them.”

Perception problem

Longtime Penn State men’s coach Mark Pavlik said he wouldn’t go so far as to label volleyball a “white” sport. Though 65% of NCAA men’s players are white, Pavlik said some of the hesitancy of Black males — and boys in general — to take up volleyball is rooted in its longstanding identity as a girls sport.

When Title IX became law in 1972, high schools raced to add girls sports. One of the easiest to add, Pavlik said, was volleyball. By the 1980s — “whenever Title IX actually developed teeth in it,” Pavlik said — girls volleyball players started to outnumber boys.

According to numbers from the National Federation of State High School Associations, 66,487 boys in the 50 states and Washington, D.C., competed in volleyball in 2021-22 compared to 454,153 girls. Collegiately, there are 239 men’s programs across three NCAA divisions, NAIA and junior college. There are 334 women’s programs in Division I alone.

Slowly, the numbers for males are increasing. According to the NFHS, the number of boys high school players went up nearly 3,000 between 2018-19 and 2021-22.

At the college level, the Northeast Conference, including St. Francis (Pa.), and the Division II Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference added men’s volleyball in the past two seasons. (St. Francis previously played in the Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association.)

The Division III Presidents’ Athletic Conference will add men’s volleyball for the 2024-25 academic year. Saint Vincent, Thiel and Geneva already have teams. (For now, they compete in the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference.) Chatham, Bethany and Grove City will add men’s programs in the next two years to round out the PAC.

“The image is starting to fall away, that volleyball is a girls sport,” Pennington said. “We kind of had to combat that for a long time. Now the game has changed so much, especially in the past decade or so. It’s gotten bigger and faster and more athletic.

“So the style of the game lends itself more to being a bit more popular with young men more so than in the past.”

Limited access

Volleyball’s image as a girls sport is eroding, but there’s another hurdle when it comes to getting more Black males involved: accessibility.

For starters, volleyball isn’t something kids in many communities can just go outside and do.

“With basketball, you can find a hoop anywhere,” said Penn Hills grad Alain Tamo-Noche, a sophomore middle at Central State. “But for volleyball, you need a whole team. You need the resources to play volleyball. People in my community don’t really have access unless they play for the (school) team.”

Said Pavlik: “I would say the opportunities for the Black athlete to grow up in the sport are fewer and further between. Every neighborhood had a basketball hoop, and I think that was the beauty of the basketball game: You can play by yourself.

“With volleyball, it was a little different. … It’s not just throwing a ball up at a target. I think that probably was more of a factor for any community, much less white, Black or whatever socioeconomic group you want to throw in there. You just don’t drive through (neighborhoods) and see volleyball nets up.”

Because volleyball doesn’t have the widespread neighborhood pick-up appeal of basketball and because broadcast exposure for men’s volleyball is limited, other means are being used to expose urban youth to the game.

During the 2022 season, for example, UCLA men’s coach and First Point chairman John Speraw took his Bruins to Georgia to play against Fort Valley State and Morehouse. It is almost unheard of for a megalithic school such as UCLA to travel to a small, historically Black school for any sport, but it was an effective way to bring the game to a new audience.

Boys from the communities around the two schools (Atlanta and Fort Valley, Ga.) were invited to watch matches and take part in clinics, which, perhaps, would inspire them to play.

But, Pennington said, that solves only part of the equation. If volleyball is moving away from being seen as a girls sport, it is starting to be identified as, in his words, a “country club” sport.

“It’s pay to play. The club scene is so big,” Pennington said. “(Colleges) recruit from clubs. If you don’t play club, you don’t get seen, which is a shame. Because that’s where the socioeconomic part comes into play. If you come from any kind of disadvantaged background, you probably aren’t going to play club ball.”

Chris Lewis, a Gateway grad who plays outside hitter at Carlow, was part of two volleyball clubs in his youth. But he is well aware that is not a reality for many other Black youth.

“It’s so expensive,” he said. “I joined two club teams, and they were extremely expensive. Everything should just be at an affordable price because then I feel like more people would do it.”

Expectations

Ezeonu laughed as he recalled the reaction of his classmates at North Brunswick Township (N.J.) High School when he quit the basketball team his senior year to concentrate on volleyball.

“They were clowning me like, ‘Why are you wasting your time playing volleyball? Play basketball. You’re so athletic.’ ” he said.

Lewis said people often are caught off guard when they learn he doesn’t play basketball or football. He said he believes society is conditioned to pigeonhole Black athletes.

“They see me being tall (6-foot-2) and are like, ‘Oh, do you play basketball? Track?’ ” he said. “ ‘No. I play volleyball.’ And that’s like the least expected answer. … When they hear volleyball, it’s rare.”

Former St. Francis (Pa.) standout Josh Blair, a three-time all-EIVA honoree, said Black athletes, too, can have tunnel vision when it comes to sports.

“I think (playing basketball and football) is something that is driven into us just because it’s popular,” he said. “We go with what we see on TV, what’s making the most money. That is seemingly our only path. … I feel like the volleyball world is such a haven of opportunity for a lot of people.”

Pennington is optimistic volleyball will become more mainstream among Black males. His confidence was buoyed when he saw the SIAC, which is made up of historically Black schools, add volleyball.

Six SIAC schools, including Central State, participate in men’s volleyball, and the vast majority of the players on the rosters are Black.

“When I saw that announcement that the SIAC was starting it, and all these HBCUs were starting programs, it was difficult getting my jaw off the ground,” said Pennington, who is Black. “I think it’s amazing.”

Tamo-Noche, too, has taken note. Though his team at Penn Hills, he said, was fairly diverse, many of the opposing schools he faced in the WPIAL had predominantly white rosters.

“Coming to an HBCU, being around Black people, then being in conference you’re playing against Black people, it was really fun,” he said. “It was something new.”

Sales pitch

Pavlik, a Derry grad who grew up watching the Pirates of the 1970s, said he and many boys of his generation imitated Willie Stargell’s “windmill” pre-at-bat routine, as if somehow the whirling motion was the source of Stargell’s mighty home run swing.

Therein lies the key, he said, to promoting volleyball to Black boys and boys in general: the power of the game.

“Anybody that watched Michael Jordan, you didn’t go out and lower a hoop then try to do layups,” Pavlik said.

Physicality is becoming the calling card of men’s volleyball. For decades, the technical aspects of the game were emphasized, but now the focus is on brute force.

“Maybe 30, 40 years ago, the difference in the game was the touch of the ball, the actual technique that was involved, where you could control it,” Pavlik said. “And now the way the game is being played at this point boils down to physicality. Anybody who is physical and stays physical has a good shot at winning.

“It’s not a game that devolves into a study of technique. It’s a game that evolves into how hard can we hit a ball, how hard can we block a ball, how hard can we serve a ball.”

Ezeonu compared a spike to dunking a basketball.

“That’s the cool part about it,” he said. “You get the same reaction from crowds. You jump and crush it, and it’s just crazy. It’s crazy when you see it, to have velocity, to have speed and just see the ball getting crushed straight down. It’s as satisfying as a windmill (dunk).”

The growing physical nature of the sport might attract more Black athletes, but, Blair said, keeping Black athletes interested requires an extra step.

Blair, who graduated from St. Francis last year, served on the EIVA Racial Equality Council, the first of its kind in men’s volleyball. Speaking from experience, Blair knows what it is like to be, in his words, “the odd man out.” In 2020, his junior year, he was one of only eight Black players among 154 total players in the EIVA.

He said it is incumbent upon coaches and teammates to make Black volleyball players feel welcome.

“A lot of what (the council) talked about is trying to foster a safe space, especially for Black students and Black athletes who are probably the only Black kid on their team,” he said. “Just be sure that we are making our other teammates, especially our white teammates, aware of certain micro-aggressions, stuff that I guess you wouldn’t realize just because you don’t necessarily know.

“It’s not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing. It’s just that you are ignorant of the fact that something makes people uncomfortable.”

Ideally, making volleyball a more attractive and “safer” venture can provide Black athletes another path to college. That was part of the lure for Tamo-Noche, who also played basketball in high school.

He didn’t have an opportunity to play basketball in college, but he got one with volleyball.

“It’s creating a lot of opportunities for a lot of Black kids, especially with starting an HBCU movement in volleyball,” he said. “There’s a lot of opportunities for you to go to school for cheap or go to school for free. At the end of the day, that’s really what’s important.”

Part of getting college attention is being seen, and Blair said Black athletes could use their “odd man out” status on the volleyball court to their advantage.

“Naturally, you’re going to stand out just because you’re not going to necessarily look like all of your competition,” he said. “And that’s something in basketball and football you don’t necessarily have. The ability to get eyes on you, especially when it’s crucial in that high school time, is pivotal. You can truly make it anywhere if you can be seen.”

Follow the leader

When one of Tamo-Noche’s closest friends decided to go out for the volleyball team at Penn Hills, he followed. If nothing else, he figured it would help him jump higher for basketball.

Now, he is using volleyball to help get his college education.

When Pennington was entering his freshman year at Peabody, he had planned on playing varsity baseball. He had a change of direction when most of his friends went out for the volleyball team.

He has been involved with the sport ever since and now is helping other minorities get involved. Pennington said he makes a conscious effort to have Black players on his roster as well as Black coaches on his staff.

It seems like an oversimplification, but kids tend to get involved in what their peers are doing. If more Black players get exposure to volleyball at a grassroots level, the hope is that a few of them would give it a try, and their friends would follow.

Those who stick with it could entice others, thereby creating a self-perpetuating pipeline of Black athletes.

Ezeonu said if Black males follow their peers to football and basketball, there’s no reason the same dynamic couldn’t work in volleyball.

“Especially at my high school, kids I grew up with, I feel like they just kind of keyed toward (basketball and football) because their companions are also Black, and it’s kind of like a chain reaction,” he said. “Be diversified in playing sports. Play whatever you want. It can start a chain reaction, like I said before. People start following you, start following your choices.”

Lewis played football until he broke his collarbone as a freshman in high school. He decided to change sports, and when he tried volleyball, he was hooked. His advice to young Black males is similar to Ezeonu’s.

“You should just be able to experience it for yourself. Forget about anybody’s opinions and just go play,” he said. “If you love the sport enough, that’s all that matters.”