Volleyball Honor

The Pathfinder Volleyball honor often starts during a break in the club meeting, when someone strings up a net and the whole Unit wants to play. It asks for more than knocking the ball around: official rules, rotation, basic skills, a younger Pathfinder to teach and good sportsmanship on the court.

The complete Volleyball honor requirements are in the catalog under the code AR-108; here they are summarized, with no answer key. The rules cited are the Official Volleyball Rules 2025-2028 of the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB), checked on October 6, 2026.

🏐What is the Pathfinder Volleyball honor?

The Volleyball honor has the code AR-108 and belongs to the Recreational Activities area. According to the catalog, it was created in 2012 by the South American Division (SAD) of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and is skill level 1, with no prerequisite. It works both for Pathfinders who already play and for those whose forearm pass still goes astray.

The sport was also born in a Christian setting. According to the FIVB, William G. Morgan (1870-1942) created the game in 1895 at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Holyoke, in the United States, as a less intense alternative to basketball for older members. It was called Mintonette, and the net stood about 1.98 m (6 feet 6 inches) off the ground. Early in 1896, at a demonstration in Springfield, Professor Alfred T. Halstead proposed the name Volley Ball.

📋What are the Volleyball honor requirements?

The catalog lists ten requirements, summarized in the table without answers. The version your Instructor uses is the one that counts. Half of them (4, 5, 6, 7 and 10) are hands-on.

Serving and passing have to be shown live, so a PDF of Volleyball honor answers will not get you there. The guide to pre-answered honors explains why a ready-made answer key does not count as completing an honor.

In requirement 3, several terms come from the rulebook itself: what the catalog calls four touches, attack hit, barrier and supported touch appears in the English edition of the rules as four hits, attack hit, screening and assisted hit. Others, such as forearm pass (bump), ace, diving save, star journey and technical timeout, are court slang that the 2025-2028 rulebook does not use.

Summary of the Desbravai catalog (AR-108). Check the full text with your Instructor.

📏What are the official volleyball rules according to the FIVB?

The Official Volleyball Rules 2025-2028 were approved by the 39th FIVB World Congress in 2024 and apply to competitions beginning after January 1, 2025. The game section has 21 rules. The FIVB rulebook has no list of “8 main rules”, so the choice for requirement 1 is yours. The table gathers the ones that decide the most points.

The new volleyball rules for 2025 brought two changes that surprise many people. Under Rule 7.4, only the receiving team must be in rotational order at the service hit; the players of the serving team may occupy any position on their own court. Under Rule 10.1.2, a ball that crosses outside the antenna can only be played back if it came from the team's first hit.

Source: FIVB, Official Volleyball Rules 2025-2028. Summary by Desbravai.

📐What are the official volleyball court dimensions and net height?

For requirement 10, a 1:100 scale is the most practical: each meter becomes 1 cm. The court comes out at 18 cm by 9 cm and, with the minimum free zone, 24 cm by 15 cm, which fits on an A4 sheet. Mark the center line, the attack lines and the posts, and write the scale in a corner.

Youth competitions may lower the net. In the 2025 volleyball regulations of the Londrina Sports Foundation (Fundação de Esportes de Londrina, in the Brazilian state of Paraná), the 12-to-14 age group plays with the net at 2.35 m for boys and 2.20 m for girls. At the club, always measure at the center of the court and check that both ends are at the same height (Rule 2.1.2).

Source: FIVB, Official Volleyball Rules 2025-2028, Chapter 1.

🔄When do you rotate in volleyball, and what are the positions and their roles?

Each side has six positions: at the net, position 4 (front-left), 3 (front-center) and 2 (front-right); in the back row, 5, 6 and 1, the serving position (Rule 7.4.1). The team rotates when it was receiving, wins the rally and gains the serve: everyone moves one position clockwise, and the player in position 2 moves to position 1 and serves (Rule 7.6.2). Serving out of order is a rotational fault and gives the opponent a point.

Many teams play a 5-1 system, with a single setter on the court, according to a study presented in 2023 at the undergraduate research conference of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), in Brazil. Each role calls for different skills, and that is what requirement 4 tests.

The libero has rules of their own (Rule 19): the libero wears a uniform of a different color and can replace any back-row player without using up a substitution.

Sources: Holderbaum (UFRGS), EFDeportes, 2013; Cardoso and Lázari (Unicamp), 2023.

🤾What are the basic volleyball skills, and how can the club run practices and a tournament?

A review by Professor Guilherme Garcia Holderbaum of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in Brazil, published in 2013, lists six skills in the order of play: serve, pass, set, attack, block and defense. The set is considered the most complex, because the attack depends on it.

For requirement 5, a simple progression works well at the club:

• Partner passing: forearm passes and overhead passes, counting how many times the ball goes back and forth.
• Underhand serve first: land it in the court before going for power.
• Attacking a hand-tossed ball: approach, jump and hit.
• Blocking without a ball: jumps at the net, with attention to the landing.

The 4 hours of requirement 6 go further in short sessions, such as four one-hour practices with a younger Pathfinder. Write down the date and content of each session.

For a tournament, adapt the rules to the group. The Londrina regulations for ages 12 to 14, for example, require teams to change three players at the start of the second set. Put Pathfinders to work as scorer and line judges, and build the bracket with the guide to the Pathfinder Club Olympics.

🩹How do you warm up for volleyball and prevent injuries?

The Physical Activity Guidelines for the Brazilian Population, from Brazil's Ministry of Health (2021), list volleyball among free-time activities for ages 6 to 17 and include jumping among the movements that strengthen muscles and bones. The daily goal and how to measure effort are in the guide to the Physical Fitness honor.

According to Children's Hospital Colorado, a children's hospital in the United States, ankle sprains are the most common acute injury in volleyball, making up about 40% of injuries in the sport, and most happen at the net, when a player comes down on someone else's foot.

Technique helps prevent them. In a 1997 study of the top two divisions of Norwegian volleyball, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, Roald Bahr and colleagues added takeoff and landing training for blocking and attacking, with balance board work for players who had repeated sprains. Sprains fell from 0.9 to 0.5 per 1,000 hours of training and play.

When warming up, go from light to intense: jogging and arm and leg movements, short passes and only then jumps. The rules themselves provide for an official warm-up of 6 or 10 minutes at the net before the match (Rule 7.2.1).

🤝What does fair play mean in volleyball, and how do you earn the honor?

Fair play means playing clean, and the English edition of the rules uses the term itself (the Brazilian translation calls it “jogo honesto”, honest play). Under FIVB Rule 20, it means accepting the referees' decisions without disputing them, not covering up your own team's faults and treating referees, opponents, teammates and spectators with respect.

In the referee-free games of requirement 7, fair play becomes a gesture: raising your hand when you touched the net and greeting the other team at the end. For requirement 8, judge the chosen player's conduct, not just their titles, using reliable sources.

Requirement 9 touches on a real issue: championships with games on Saturday. The commandment says, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8, NKJV). Bring concrete alternatives to the conversation, such as leagues with games on weekdays or on Sunday, physical education at school, and club and church tournaments. The article on living your faith at school helps you prepare for the conversation with your coach.

Common mistakes with this honor:

• Studying an old rulebook. Use the 2025-2028 edition.
• Thinking the team rotates on every point. Only the team that wins back the serve rotates.

When you are ready, review the complete Volleyball honor requirements in the catalog and set up the evaluation with your Instructor; the article on who signs off on an honor explains how it is validated. In the same area, take a look at the Handball honor and the Adapted Sports honor.