A Point on Every Play: Volleyball and the Attention Economy
An update to my November 2023 post, The Rise of Active Sports in the Age of Instant Gratification. The idea held up. The numbers did not, and one part of the original argument turned out to be wrong.
My daughter plays volleyball at a small college, so I have spent a lot of the last few years in gyms.
Late in a fifth set last season her team served into the net. Point. The next rally ran maybe forty seconds, four or five swings a side, and ended on a block. Point. Twenty seconds after that, an ace. Point.
Three points inside a minute. The crowd stood up three separate times.
I have been watching baseball games my entire life. Although being at the game is way more exciting, I have never once seen a crowd stand up three times in a minute.
Why does volleyball feel faster than other sports?
Volleyball feels faster because every rally ends in a point. Under rally scoring, somebody scores on every serve, whether the ball dies in the net or survives thirty seconds of digs. A competitive 25-point set runs roughly 40 to 50 rallies. A five-set match can total 250 points.
Baseball gives you the foul ball and the pickoff throw, football the incomplete pass. Volleyball has no equivalent. Nothing in the sport ends in nothing.
That is why a volleyball crowd never really settles.
What is rally scoring, and when did volleyball adopt it?
Rally scoring awards a point on every rally regardless of who served. The FIVB adopted it internationally in 1999. The NCAA and NAIA followed in 2001 with sets played to 30, then cut sets to 25 in 2008 and started calling them sets instead of games.
I did not know any of this until she started playing seriously.
The old side-out system only let the serving team score. You could win a twenty-touch rally and come away with nothing but the ball. Matches ran long and nobody could tell you when they would end. The NCAA's stated reasoning for the shorter set was that it would add intensity the sport had been missing and make it better for television.
A rules committee pointed volleyball at the attention economy on purpose, two decades before baseball put a clock on the pitcher.
Why do fast-scoring sports hold attention?
Because unpredictable rewards are the most habit-forming kind. The behavioral term is variable-ratio reinforcement, the same mechanism that runs a slot machine. You know a payout is coming. You cannot time it.
Volleyball pays out on every rally and never tells you which side is getting paid.
That is also the shape of a phone. The research worth citing comes from Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, who has been logging screen behavior since 2004. Average time on a single screen fell from about two and a half minutes in 2004, to 75 seconds in 2012, to roughly 47 seconds in her recent work. You may have run into a claim that human attention is down to eight seconds, shorter than a goldfish. Nobody has ever produced the research behind it.
How fast is volleyball actually growing?
Girls' volleyball set an all-time high of 492,799 high school participants in 2024-25, up from 452,808 in 2018-19, according to the NFHS. It trails only outdoor track and field nationally and leads all girls' sports in 23 states. Boys' volleyball went from 66,487 to 95,972 in three years. High school football slid from about 1.11 million in 2010 to 1,031,039 last year.
In August 2023, Nebraska put 92,003 people in a football stadium to watch a volleyball match, a world record for a women's sporting event.
Then the money arrived. Athletes Unlimited started a pro season in 2021. The Pro Volleyball Federation began play in 2024. League One Volleyball launched in January 2025 with six teams and $100 million raised. Three new leagues in five years, in a sport that had gone decades without one.
Does this mean slow sports are dying?
No, and the sport I would have called slow is the reason I had to rethink the whole idea.
Baseball attendance has risen three straight seasons to 71.4 million in 2025. Game 7 of last year's World Series went eleven innings and drew about 26 million American viewers, roughly 51 million counting Canada and Japan. Most-watched baseball game in 34 years, and more than half again the audience for Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Football took 92 of the top 100 American telecasts.
So the axis is wrong. Resolution predicts attention better than scoring does. A football game hands you around 150 snaps and every one of them ends in a definite outcome, even though almost none of them end in points. The pitch clock and the new challenge system on balls and strikes are baseball manufacturing more of those moments, which is what volleyball's rules committee did in 2001.
What I am watching for this season
The 2026 college season opened ten days ago in Milwaukee, ten of the best programs in the country playing eight matches in four days. ESPN has more than 2,400 women's matches scheduled this fall, the most it has ever carried. It ends in San Antonio in December.
Although she doesn't play at big named school, her season started too and I love watching the team play.
Volleyball resolves faster than any sport my kids have played, and it asks more forgetting than any of them. A point goes against her and she has about twenty seconds to let it go, because the next serve is already on its way and it does not care.
Her sport pays her on every rally. It also makes her drop the last one before the next serve. The scrolling never asks her for that second part.
The season is ten days old. If you have never watched a college match, this is a good year to start.
Quick answers
Is volleyball the most popular girls' sport in America?
Nationally it ranks second, behind outdoor track and field. It leads all girls' sports in 23 states.
When did volleyball switch to rally scoring?
The FIVB adopted rally scoring in 1999. The NCAA and NAIA followed in 2001 and moved to 25-point sets in 2008.
How many points are in a volleyball match?
A 25-point set usually runs 40 to 50 rallies. A five-set match can reach 250 points, one for every rally played.
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