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Summary of Volley-Tag
This new sport has recently taken the spotlight from other sports due to its "classic" factor of involving the childhood game “Tag” and the popular sport “Volleyball”. However, it is much different than the Tag that children play and the Volleyball that athletes play. Volley-Tag requires both individual skills and team play in order to claim victory.

Rules

 * The game is played between two teams of 12. Each team can have 6 players on the court at a time, and one tagger on the opposing team’s side.
 * A volleyball size court will be used; each team will occupy each half of the court.
 * The game, for the most part, follows the traditional rules of volleyball.
 * Once the volley is ended, the tagger has the opportunity to tag out a member of the team that ended the volley. So if Team A made a mistake that ended the volley, the tagger from Team B (who is on the same side of the court as Team A) has three seconds to attempt to “tag out” a player.
 * Once a player is tagged, they are not allowed to participate for the rest of the game.
 * The team with the last player remaining wins that set.
 * Taggers cannot push, hit, shove, or be otherwise aggressive when attempting to tag out the players. Doing so will result in a foul. For every foul, the opposing team will be allowed to bring back a player from elimination.
 * Any player on the team is allowed to be the tagger, but once chosen, no one else may be the tagger in that game.
 * Like volleyball, this sport will be separated by gender.
 * The men’s and women’s teams wear similar uniforms to the original volleyball game.

The Origins of Court Tag
Surprisingly, there is evidence this sport was created thousands of years ago. Many cave drawings and other prehistoric art have depicted an activity similar to the volley-tag we know and love today. However, it grew in popularity after the creation of volleyball in the late 19th/early 20th century. Unlike volleyball, volley-tag is not gender typed as a feminine sport (2). The sport was originally played exclusively by white men. It was around the time Title IX went into effect that a women’s league was created and the sport became integrated. However, this is not to say people of color and women were welcomed to the sport with open arms. Both groups faced forms of discrimination - women’s teams usually played for near-empty audiences, and fans often boycotted games in which a team with a person of color was playing. Issues of racism and racist ideologies prevailed because of how often they were allowed to fly under the radar. When Jack Smith (the first black player in the NVTL, a player for the Houston Meteors) raised concerns about always being chosen as the tagger he was met with backlash and was told to be “grateful” for even being allowed to play (3). The league has been historically conservative and bigoted in other ways, too. When Emma James, who played for the Tulsa Tornadoes, came out as gay in the 80s, her entire team was met with consequences. Attendance at Tornadoes games plummeted, as did jersey sales (4). In interviews, many of her teammates were asked questions regarding their sexualities (5) to which most responded with aggression and disgust (6). After this, there was, what seemed to be, a league-wide effort to feminize the players of the NWVTL (7). Now, however, both the NVTL and the NWVTL are making strides in becoming more inclusive and supportive of women and minorities.

Current Concerns
Today, a large majority of the concerns regarding volley-tag are related to the differences between men’s and women’s league. The men’s league receives both quantitative and qualitative media coverage that is not afforded to the women’s league. Fan’s cite “aggressive,” “fast,” and “exciting” games as the reason they watch men’s games but not women’s (8). Born of this problem is the issue of equal pay. Like many sports, the men’s league makes a disproportionate amount of money compared to the women’s teams (9). Many players from the women’s league have been outspoken advocates for equal pay and now the women’s league as a whole is in conversation in hopes to make progress in this area (10). While this may seem like a step in the right direction, many fans and players of the women’s league feel it is long overdue. For nearly a decade, players have been championing for equal, or even fair, pay. It was not until recently, however, that their cause began to gain traction. When players and coaches from the men’s league announced their support for the cause, major media outlets began covering the story and brought the issue to the center of the cultural conversation (11).

Connections

 * Dress Code – unlike handball (and many other sports) men and women’s volley-tag players wear very similar jerseys (lecture 2/2).
 * Gender Typing - volley-tag isn’t as gender typed as other sports, but it does lean more masculine (Sobal 2019).
 * Scientific Racism –In the early days of the league, it was not uncommon for black athletes to primarily be chosen as taggers, because they were presumed to be faster (Fleming 2002).
 * Riddle Homophobia Scale - The response to Emma James coming out was in alignment with Level 1: Repulsion on the Riddle homophobia scale (lecture 2/14).
 * Lesbian Stereotype - Though volley-tag isn’t as physical of a sport as basketball or rugby (and there’s a correlation between the physicality of a sport and the likelihood of its players being stereotyped as lesbian) many players in the league were historically assumed to be lesbians (Russell 2007).
 * Homohysteria - players were afraid of also being perceived as gay, so they doubled-down, as it were, on the efforts to appear more feminine, in hopes of proving their heterosexuality (Anderson et. al 2016).
 * Feminine Apology – after the backlash faced by lesbian NWVTL player, the league attempted to feminize its players in order to lessen the blow (lecture 2/14).
 * Hegemonic Masculinity – fans deem women’s sports to be “less exciting” than men’s (Lecture 1/31).
 * Salary/Compensation – Like many sports, players in the women’s league make less money (Lecture 3/7).
 * Athlete Activism – social media has allowed for athletes (especially those historically not given a voice) to advocate for issues important to them. (Lecture 4/4).
 * Prioritization of men in activsim – Men’s voices tend to garner the most attention in terms of activism, though this is beginning to change (Cooky et. al 2020).