1. You spend most of your time active. While you get to rest a bit between points, volleyball makes all 12 people on the court move all over the place and that is just tiring!

2.You rarely get to hold onto the ball, you have to rebound it. That’s just not fair. Aren’t sports about catching, throwing or just simply holding onto the ball? When things aren’t correct in volleyball, you can’t just pause and figure out what to do next.

3. You have to jump… A LOT. Again, it’s tiring! And who wants stronger leg muscles anyway?

4. You only get to touch the ball three times before you give it back. What the heck? That’s not enough time to work out a real offense! You have to learn to “better the ball” by taking a bad pass and making a great set from it, or handling any kind of second contact.

5. You have to win by TWO points. Most other sports let you win by just a point, or even TIE. Volleyball is too challenging as you have to win by TWO points! What’s wrong with just having the lead at the end for gosh sakes?

6. You have to win more than one set. It’s not good enough to win the one set… Nooooooo. Volleyball makes you win three of five, or at minimum two of three sets. It would be better if you just have to win the first game and then you can boast of your victory.

7. You have to play offense AND defense. You have to get good at both, along with all those unique skills like spiking, blocking AND forearm passing?! Who has good forearm-eye coordination?

8. Things come too fast and too often from too close.  Listen, something moving at more than 100 kph is not supposed to be coming toward my face from 1-7 meters away.

9. Someone is always scoring a point. Sports are supposed to make successes hard. In volleyball there is a point scored on every play! All this point-scoring confuses me. Who can keep track? And then I argue about it being a point and if the officials don’t agree, I am unhappy.

10. You get to be your own cheerleader. All that fun celebrating and team bonding, point after point. I just want to cheer with my teammates every once in a while. 

11. You have to hit the floor. So when I’m not jumping, I have to throw myself at a hard floor or grainy sand? What’s up with that?

12. You might have to play with the other gender. Since it is a non-contact sport, men and women, girls and boys can play together. Mixed competition has resulted in tens of thousands of marriages and countless fun matches.  Nope, sports are for one gender to play, while the other gender cheers them on and admires their talents.

13. You may have to do it on the sand, grass, concrete, asphalt, snow, wood chips, and even water. That will simply screw up your timing and make some of the skills really hard to do. 

14. You might have to play it sitting down! They say that there are only four core rule differences between the Olympic and Paralympic disciplines of volleyball. No way, sitting volleyball has to be more complex than that. They also let able-bodied players play with the disabled players. That is just too good to be true.

15. You can’t touch the net! Huh? Then why did you put it right in the middle of the game?

So there you have it. All sorts of excuses and pseudo-reasons to NOT join a game, form a league team or play in a doubles tourney in this sport for a lifetime.  I would rather just watch sports on television, it’s far less risk.