William George Morgan was born on January 23, 1870. His father, George Henry Morgan, emigrated from Wales to the United States in 1861 and founded the Morgan Brothers Boat Building Company in Lockport, New York. Morgan’s mother, Nancy Chatfield, was a native of Northfield, Vermont, and William G. Morgan was the oldest son of six siblings.

Morgan initially left school at the age of 15 to work on a canal boat, but he eventually recognized the value of earning an education and decided that he wanted to pursue a career as an engineer. With this in mind, he applied to and was accepted at the Mount Hermon School for Boys—founded by D.L. Moody in Gill, Massachusetts—in the winter of 1890-1891. While at the Mt. Hermon School, Morgan joined a singing quartet whose accompanist, Mary King Caldwell—a student at the nearby Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in Northfield, Massachusetts—eventually became Morgan’s wife.

Morgan also served as class chaplain, and he played center on the Mt. Hermon football team. On October 21, 1892, the Mt. Herman Football team faced the team from the International YMCA Training School, now Springfield College. The International YMCA Training School’s team was led by player/coach James Naismith—who had created the game of basketball at the Training School in 1891. By the fall of 1892, Naismith had taken over as the School’s football coach from Amos Alonzo Stagg—who later became known as the “Grand Old Man of Football” and who had just left the Training School to take a coaching position at the newly-formed University of Chicago. Although the Training School defeated the Mt. Hermon School, it seems likely that Morgan’s football abilities impressed Naismith, because “records at Mount Hermon indicate that Morgan interrupted his course of study by withdrawing from the school on October 25, 1892—just four days after meeting Naismith’s team on the field, […] and the October 1892 International Association Training School Notes, a monthly bulletin, lists William G. Morgan as a junior and the ‘center’ on the football team.” The International YMCA Training School’s records for 1892-1893 list Morgan as a junior in the Physical Department, and he is also pictured in several of the Schools team photographs from those years.

As a student in the Training School’s Physical Department, Morgan was trained to become a physical director for the YMCA. He took his first position in Auburn, Maine after marrying Mary King Caldwell on October 7, 1893 and graduating from the Training School in 1894. By 1895, William had returned to Western Massachusetts to work at the Holyoke YMCA. That same fall, Morgan developed a new game for the local businessmen who attended the Holyoke YMCA. Morgan felt that other Y sports like basketball were sometimes “a bit too rough and rowdy,” so there was a need for a less strenuous game. Morgan stretched a tennis net across the gymnasium, divided the players into two teams, and instructed them to bat the ball—which was made from the inflated bladder of a basketball—back and forth over the net. He called his new game “mintonette.”

Soon after this, Luther Halsey Gulick—who was then head of the Physical Department at the International YMCA Training School—invited Morgan to present mintonette to the participants of the Physical Director’s Conference to take place on July 7, 1896. This game took place in the East Gymnasium of the School, and one of Morgan’s former professors, A.T. Halsted suggested that a more appropriate name for this game would be ‘volley ball,’ since the players were constantly volleying the ball back and forth to each other and across the net. Morgan quickly agreed to this suggestion, and mintonette became known as volley ball.

The first rules for volleyball were printed that same year in the July 1896 edition of Physical Education, published by the Triangle Publishing Company which had been founded several years earlier by Luther H. Gulick and other members of the Physical Department at the International YMCA Training School. Some of Morgan’s original rules—including “the initiation of each play with a serve, the net separating the opponents, and the size of the ball”—are still used today, despite the many changes the game has undergone since its creation.

Like basketball before it, volleyball quickly became a popular sport, first in YMCAs and then across the United States and around the world. As volleyball’s popularity was spreading, Morgan left his YMCA career and returned with his family to his hometown, Lockport, New York. Apart from a brief, unsuccessful move to the Galveston, Texas area, Morgan remained in Lockport, where he and his wife raised their five children, for the rest of his life. After leaving the YMCA, Morgan worked first as a salesman at the General Electric and Westinghouse, and in 1920, he became an inspector at the Harrison Radiator Division of the General Motors Corporation.

Morgan apparently returned to Springfield College only once—on March 1, 1938—after moving back to Lockport and giving up YMCA work. In addition, on March 22, 1939, Morgan received a varsity “S” sweater from the College at a dinner reception held in his honor in Lockport. Morgan retired that same year and died just a few years later on December 12, 1942 at the age of 72.

During his lifetime, Morgan witnessed the publishing of the first official volleyball rule book in 1916, the inclusion of volleyball in the recreation programs of the American armed forces in World War I, and the founding of the United States Volley Ball Association (USVBA) in 1928. In 1985, he was posthumously inducted as the very first member of the Volleyball Hall of Fame, located in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Morgan’s legacy as the originator of volleyball also lives on in the “Morgan Trophy Award,” which is presented annually by the William G. Morgan Foundation (founded in 1995) to the most outstanding male and female collegiate volleyball players in the United States.