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William G. Morgan graduated from the Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Massachusetts, in 1891. Here he met James Naismith who urged him to attend the International YMCA Training School. Morgan did so and graduated from the school in 1894. He immediately became the Physical Director of the Auburn YMCA in Maine. He stayed there for one year before he left for the Holyoke Mass. YMCA.
While at Holyoke he was working with a gym class of middle-aged businessmen, and realized that basketball was too strenuous of a game for some of them. He tried out a few ideas, which led to the invention of volleyball. The game was first called mintonette and got its official name in 1896 when Luther Gulick, the founder of the Physical Education Department at the YMCA Training School (Springfield College), invited Morgan to demonstrate the game to his students. While watching the game, Dr, Alfred Halstead suggested it be called volleyball, since that is what the ball was doing.
He left the Holyoke YMCA in 1897 to begin a career with General Electric and Westinghouse. He continued to keep ties with Springfield College and the game he created, stating he was “content in the knowledge that the game brought a richer life to millions of people throughout the world.” He was inducted into the Springfield College Athletic Hall of Fame in 1978 and into the Volleyball Hall of Fame in 1985.
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