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University Daily Kansan, October 7, 1980
P. S. LEE, PUBLIC SERVICE AUTHORITY
Game of volleyball, not players, invites injuries
By KEVIN BERTELS Sports Writer
In volleyball, it's not whether you win
game, it's whether you can play the next
one.
Few sports offer the opportunities for injuries that volleyball does. When six players are crowded into a 30-by 30-foot square and when the nature of the game calls for diving on a hardwood floor or blocking at close range a ball being hit as hard as possible, injuries are almost invited.
But not by KU coach Bob Lockwood and his volleyball team. Though the game may invite injuries, it is also one where you can avoid injuries. Certainly no one can imagine a basketball coach telling his team to slow down so they won't get hurt. By the same token, volleyball coach techniques but fitness techniques for safety.
Take, for example, one of the more obvious actions on a volleyball court that could cause injury—the dive. To the spectator, diving headlong to the floor appears to be the most dangerous move possible.
To the volleyball player, the move has become natural through training and repetition. Tina Wilson, a senior on the team, said yesterday that she had to learn each small part of the dive and then put them all together.
its components," she said. "It can be broken down into separate little parts.
The other way around is easier."
After many bruises and floor burns, the proper technique for diving onto a hardwood floor is perfected. But then a ball is hit hard and all the newly learned techniques are flung away and an all-out dive is the only answer. Skin and bones hit the floor at the same time, and both the crowd and the player know it was not proper technique, according to KU team trainer Renea Bulmer.
"Everyone in a while you hear the screech of skin on the floor, but usually you don't."
Shelly Fox and Jill Stinson avoid a collision during Volleyball is a sport that invites injuries from diving Injuries to fingers from blocking and floor burns an hardwood floor are commonplace for Volleyball play
Knowing how to fall includes keeping the hips and knees on the floor, not always easy or possible, because they protrude further than the rest of the body which is much more vulnerable. Brushes are the result of dives, and they can be seen on every ball player.
"THE IDEA IS for them to start out slow and put most of the weight on their chest and stomach and arch their back into the floor. Their knees in the floor." Bulmer said.
As the trainer, she knows that is not always achieved.
"They sometimes get burns on their hips," she said. "As far as stomach and chest go, they don't get hurt. But they can still to bump bones once in a while."
know as boxers and hockey players
know about missing teeth, toothball
cording to Diane Schroeder, a senior on the team.
"Volleyball is so much diving or rolling," she said. "If you don't dive right, you cut your chin open. I don't think there is a girl on our team who can play well but chin open. Eventually your boy begins to adjust to the way to dive."
Most volleyball injuries come from players landing on something besides the flat part of the foot against the flat floor. Whether it is a ball, someone hit the ball, or both, own foot, chances are good that what goes up won't land where it started.
THE DIVE IS the most obvious on-court suicidal move, but not the most injurious, according to Lockwood.
"Things such as net violations cause injuries, when one girl lands on the foot of a girl on the other side of the net." You should never go under the net. In practice, there are a lot of balls around. We make it policy that the girls yell 'ball' and not jump until the ball is inside the net. We can be alert for and do from day-to-day.
But other things can cause injuries. A very common injury in volleyball is the finger sprain; volleyball's version of the jammed finger. The sprain often occurs when a player tries to hit the net. The ball bends the finger back a bit further than it is supposed to go, and
more finger injuries this year," Bulmer said. "You've got a girl spiking as hard as she can and you get a finger bent back too far."
Schroeder, who leads the team in warm-ups, and who helped Lockwood design the warm-up routine, says that they are indispensable. an important—they are indispensable.
"CONCERNING INJURIES," it's top of the list, Schroeder said. "Every injury that I can spot, if it isn't a freak accident, happened from not rotating the ankle or the knee or something. I think because of the physical difference, girls need to stretch more than guys."
One particular injury that hinges directly on stretching is tendinitis. The quick action of serving can wear on the shoulder, and often servers develop tendinitis, much like pitchers develop sore shoulders.
"You use your shoulder for everything in volleyball." Lockwood
While serving, volleying and spiking,
and in the midst of any number of
situations that could cause injury, one
tells me that it was easy to develop
fear, also.
But from the first referee's whistle to the end of the match, fear must be put out. The goal is to make a volleyball is a game of seconds, and hesitating to contemplate fear and
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