Winter is coming - Snow Volleyball anyone?
Snow volleyball is a winter team sport played by two teams of three players on a snow court divided by a net. The objective of each team is to score points by sending a ball over the net so as to ground it on the opponent's court, and to prevent the same effort by the opponent. A team is allowed up to three touches to return the ball across the net, and individual players may not touch the ball twice consecutively.
The sport originated in Austria as a variant of beach volleyball. The Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) is the international governing body for the sport.
Volleyball has been played on snow for decades, especially in countries such as Russia, Austria and Switzerland, even though without any specifically codified rules, but simply as a variation of the Volleyball game on snow. Unofficial Snow Volleyball competitions were held in Austria and Switzerland in the late 90s, before the idea reemerged in 2008, upon the initiative of Martin Kaswurm, a local promoter. The sport gained popularity in Wagrain,
Austria, in 2008, and the first Snow Volleyball Tour was set up the following year. It was recognized as an official sport by the Austrian Volleyball Association in 2011. Initially taking place across Austria, the Tour expanded to include stops in other European countries by 2013.
The European Volleyball Confederation (CEV) officially added the sport in October 2015 and organized the first CEV Snow Volleyball European Tour in 2016. The inaugural CEV European Snow Volleyball Championships took place in March 2018 in Austria.A Snow Volleyball European Tour under the umbrella of the CEV has taken place yearly ever since, with events held in countries as diverse as Austria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Italy, Liechtenstein, Russia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Turkey, while national championships qualifying to the inaugural European Championships were organised by 17 National Federations in the winter of 2018.
With plans to make snow volleyball part of the future Winter Olympic Games programme, the FIVB and the CEV recruited former beach volleyball Olympians to compete in a demonstration of the sport at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Since then, more efforts have been made to increase global participation in the sport. In the first tournament of the 2018–19 European Tour season, teams from the United States, Brazil and Kazakhstan were invited to compete for the first time.
Meanwhile, the inaugural FIVB Snow Volleyball World Tour started in 2019, with two events co-hosted by the FIVB and CEV in Wagrain and Plan de Corones, followed by the first extra-European such event held in Bariloche, Argentina. Teams from countries with little tradition in winter sports such as Brazil and Argentina have been able to claim their first international medals in any snow or ice sports through the introduction of the Snow Volleyball World Tour.
