Beelzebub's attourney, I'm bored and want to cause trouble

Okay, here's the thing. I'm always interested in the differences between the genders (honestly), and something that comes up quite often is whether men's volleyball is played at a higher standard than women's volleyball. At least at English University level, this is a commonly-held belief.

Two questions, therefore :
1. is this true?
2. if it is true, why?

The why part has two factors, physical and psychological. Now, on the physical side it's clear that women are generally shorter, and generally less physically strong than men (although the exact extent of this isn't clear - Ivana drew with a men's team member at arm-wrestling a year or so back...). While I can grant the strength, how about speed? Or reaction time?
Is the sole difference between women's and men's teams based on physical factors, or Is there a mental issue as well? Are women less competitive? Less willing to be aggressive? If this is the case, it would play a role in training as well, and coaches' attitudes would be involved. On the plus side, there's also a belief that women's teams can be better at holding together under pressure ...

Finally, how do differences between the genders work out at international level? You're dealing with individuals at the peak of both physical and mental toughness, so maybe it's just not possible to compare.

hmmm. Let the flame-wars begin.

Dammit, why do you have to post something like this that you KNEW I would want to respond to while I should be working?!?!?! Here we go, time to procrastinate even though I'm sure nobody will read this...

As someone who has spent a lot more time playing mixed and men's (+1 ) than women's, I have to admit I get very frustrated by discrepancy in levels between men's and women's vball here in England. But I don't think it's a discrepancy between teams, I think it's between players.

The way I see it, men DO in general have 2 general advantages, which were already mentioned. 1. They TEND to be taller, and 2. They TEND to hit harder. Everything else, though, is pretty much equal. There is no reason why a woman can't dig the strong men's hits as well as a man, why she can't set as well, can't serve as well, can't run plays as well, can't aim for spots as well, etc. But for some reason, this is the case here. Why???

I think it's a question of attitude. If you take a male player who shares one or both of these disadvantages, you find they tend to improve or adjust or push themselves so they can still compete. Examples: Jul ir my height, but is obviously a very essential and useful setter. Or my uber-short friend from home has trained so that he has an amazing vertical and can jump to get just as high as the tall guys (who often are barely jumping). Furthermore, on defense men are trained to deal with men's hits and expect them.

Girls, on the other hand, are programmed to accept this inferiority and just deal with it. They're not trained to take hard hits, and so if they can't take one they shrug it off. A guy would NEVER do that. I remember after the girls lost to Greg and Denis I asked one of the players (who will remain anonymous ) if she was upset that we just got our asses kicked by two people. She said no, because she doesn't mind losing to guys. Are you kidding me?! I've got a billion more examples of this.

There's also the attitude taken by other people. I've heard recently the rumour that guys won't hit as hard at a girl than they would at a guy, regardless of level. And I've heard "Girls don't really play" comments from at least one (anonymous ) club member. If other people go easy on you and/or don't think you can play, that just kinda adds to the problem. That's why I've always been a firm believer in the practice of guys not dropping their level to play with a girl. This is how I learned to play- trial by fire where I had to improve asap or risk getting my ass kicked, being humiliated, and, worst of all, being the weakest link.

So yeah, that's pretty much it. If girls don't believe in themselves, and if nobody else believes in them, they won't play as well. Or if their goals remain sub-par compared to men's goals, of course they won't be as good. I blame society.

hello darksiders!

here's another consideration. women play on a lower net because they are, on average, shorter. then why don't they play on a smaller court and, if you want to be really pedantic, with a smaller ball. to be politically correct i should perhaps question why men don't play on a bigger court (and with a bigger ball) but seeing as the game was first invented for men i'll present it this way round, anyway, you get my argument i hope. ok, so maybe the ball-size might be insignificant but the fact that the same court size is used must result in different challenges for men and women. not only is a women's reach shorter than a man's (on average) but the net height:court area ratio is very different between men's and women's volleyball.

this not only means that women must defend a relatively larger area but the trajectory of the balls that they defend can be very different. attackers' contact points are not as high as men's so the ball has a shorter distance to travel to hit the floor. this is probably more than off-set by the fact that women hit the ball less hard and less steeply but reach must be an issue. i also find serve receive much more difficult on a women's height net, short serves can be much shorter and lower so drop to the floor quicker. stepping up means you become vulnerable to high deep serves and then women are shorter so it even trickier!

i guess my point is women play a slightly more difficult game than men. although of course a relatively bigger ball is easier to play with....

hmm. Interesting point. I'd definitely concur with the fact that serves on a woman's net are a sod to receive.

Ball size? That's probably going a bit overboard.

I'm not sure how much the limited reach is an issue on defense since in general you take out tall players on back row and replace them with shorter players.

But definitely intersting point about the net height: court area ratio. I know defense is very different when play w/ men on a men's net than when playing w/ women on a women's net, but I'm not sure which one is more difficult. I'll have a think on that one.

Hey guys. It is my feeling that what differences there are between men's and women's sports in the UK are culturally conditioned. At the top level, international VB women's matches are quite exciting - points typically last loger than in men's
matches - so it can't be a matter of intrinsic differences between the genders; but in the UK only the very top few women's teams are (relatively) high caliber. If you compare North America, there are plenty of very good female athletes. The US women's soccer team, for instance, always wins the international women's soccer tournaments. I think this is due to the promotion of women's sports, particularly at the university level, across North America since the 1960s. Somehow in Britain, and perhaps in Europe more generally, it is deemed unladylike to play sports. In reality, though, athletic women are very attractive. So I can only encourage women to play, and to play hard. Those are my, possibly contentious, thoughts on the subject.

Physical and mental conditioning do interrelate pretty tightly. Among the girls, I'm confident that only a tiny percentage would do weights exercises. This goes alongside the 'ladylike' tag mentioned earlier. Set against that, you'd probably have a higher proportion of girls who go jogging to improve fitness.

Paul

In terms of gender difference, I am actually more curious about the reason why girls are much better than guys in cheering.

What are the psychological obstacles and the PHYSICAL barriers for guys
to stand/SIT up and cheer for a team of girl that just cheered for guy's team?

It's not like the players have the obligation to put on a show to excite
spectator. On the contrary, I usually shout louder when the
team is losing or not in good
condition. Because I think that's what cheering team is for.
But apparently not everyone has to think in the same way.

Although, I have to say, I really think my cheering is very cheap
and it doesn't worth my time.

Having say that, I have genuine respect to those who did stand by the side
and cheer for us, especially under such big contrast.

H.

Paul, it looks like your thread took off after all!

I couldn't agree more with whoever posted the stuff about cultural differences. My (albeit short) stint playing in college back in America showed me just how intense women's sports can be. Paul, I think your comment about the weight training is the perfect example of this. You may be right about the percentage of women willing to do weight training in the UK, but it's definitely NOT the case back home. We had to do some pretty intense weight training (including 100 push-ups a day- what's all this whining about having to do 10 for a missed serve?) Where (as I ranted before, women here seem to believe they're automatically worse than men) I remember when I suggested to my college coach that we scrimmage our men's club team the idea was rejected because it was seen as being beneath us. And someone in Weymouth (can't remember who) was saying that apparantly 80% of British women have NEVER played a comeptitive sport. Growing up in the states, I would have to think pretty hard to come up with ONE classmate of mine who didn't do a sport of some sort at some point in time.

Any thoughts on this from other parts of the globe? Continental Europe, I'm looking in your direction...

As for the cheering, I'm not sure how much that's a true overall gender issue. It seems that once guys actually do sit/stand up to cheer, they're freakin' fantastic at it. Maybe the motions involved in sitting up are too strenuous? Perhaps we should instigate mandatory US women's college team style crunches to help train for this. (I think we had to do something like 500 per day.)

There is definitely the issue that most girls in the UK don't play competitive sport from a young age, so don't really have the mental or physical basis to be a decent athlete. You only have to look at Lufbra homegrown players - they get all that training, and yet they're still not very good (and their best player last year was a tall foreigner with a credit card jump).

This may sound oversimple, but if you give most girls in this country a tennis ball and ask them to throw it as hard as they can, what you typically see is a sort of ungainly shot-putt like heave and the ball doesn't go very far or very fast. Most will never have developed the necessary technique or coordination at a young age, whereas most boys will have. Yet armspeed and wrist snap are the two crucial aspects of a volleyball swing - if you can't throw a ball hard, you'll never spike a volleyball hard.

The standard of women's volleyball at the Uni level is unfortunately not very high in the UK. Basically, to be decent at sport you need to have a good level of (a) athleticism, ( technique and © attitude. Put simply, most women Uni players don't have these. This generally isn't their fault, it's mainly because they start sport/volleyball late and don't have the opportunity to train enough to make a major difference.

Look at the Oxford and Cambridge student women's teams. In my opinion there is only one player on each of these teams who has a decent spike approach - i.e. an approach that starts low and fast, and swings through with the arms to get vertical drive and arch the body ready for the spike. Not surprisingly, these players are virtually the only ones who can actually hit the ball *down*, whereas the others typically jump less than a foot and topspin the ball over... Yet these are two of the best teams in the country.

Dumbass program inserted smilies automatically

Not to put all the blame on the women's side - I think it doesn't help sporting culture that it's full of loutish behaviour; no wonder women want little to do with it! And Britain has got a strange sporting culture in general - for instance, losing admirably is somehow deemed more heroic than winning. Hmmm. It'd be nice to see the England football team win their last group stage match convincingly! Of course, it would be nice to see the French side win tout court.

Couple of points :
1. the majority of university-level volleyball-players (men and women) in the UK aren't English, so the issue of their not playing competitive sport at school is moot. I do wonder to what extent the prevailing attitudes here affect new-comers. What you notice a fair bit is that a new player from the US will start the year arriving 20-30 minutes before each session, but then as she realises that everyone else is showing up 5-10 minutes late, she quickly changes her behavior. The same process may well occur with actual gameplay. Are our expectations of what people are expected to do determining what they can achieve?

2. in terms of attitude, I think Elga was right when she talked about guys being more competitive with each other inside a team. This drives them towards going to the gym, hitting harder in practice, etc, even when they don't have a background in competitive sport. I probably haven't observed the same level of within-team competition among the girls.

2. in defence of volleyball, I'd have to say that the behavior is generally pretty good. There's some exceptions, but they're very rare. It's one of the things that makes me like volleyball.

Allez les Togos ! :-)

Wow, that's a lot of interesting views on the differences between women and men in volleyball. I can add a few things from the European mainland point of view.

1. I think, just like in tennis, that the game of volleyball women play is different to the men's game. A men's game (at the highest level, maybe a bit similar at lower levels) will generally be finished quicker, because almost every spike should be a point, while in the women's game the ball will be picked up more often, which makes the game more interesting (?, opinions may vary). Causes of this may be different and may have to do with things mentioned earlier, like the power of the men and the net height - size of the court ratio. Also men may put more effort in the first spike, because it has to be a point, whereas the women expect to have to hit another time in that rally, so reserve some energy.

2. Although I know that most of the players in BUSA are foreign, I think the level of women volleyball certainly has something to do with that women in England don't play a lot of sports competitively. If the English women could put up a certain standard of volleyball, the foreigners coming in could lift that level up. However, now the foreigners, often here for only a year, need to set the level on their own, whereas they play in different systems and for the first time together. Maybe good to compare the amount of English guys and girls in BUSA volleyball.

3. What I think is a problem in England as well, is the wish to only have a 'best' team. In other clubs where I've played we always had up to 5 other teams. This keeps the standard up and prepares players who are just not good enough to play in the top team, to improve a lot and be good enough next year. I think we made a good start by starting up the development squad or second team. However, I think we still missed out on an average group of students, who are just not good enough for the first team, but too good for the second team. Maybe we can think of something for them next year. I think something like this will also make people go to the gym, as their coach told them they are not strong enough, but see that the players in the first team are stronger and they want to be in the first team too. I agree with Elga, that in the Netherlands at higher levels (above the level I played) all women use weights AND go running. But I am certain that at the level we currently play, for many women, the teaching of basic technique is more important than working with weights.