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Originally Posted by Scrapper1
I understand that. We care about the internal air pressure, not how the ball reacts on the floor. But if the ball bounces the proper height off the floor, doesn't that indicate the proper internal air pressure? Since we don't bounce the ball off the floor as a part of the game of volleyball, how are we to know what the proper height will be if the pressure is correct???? First, we would have to gauge the ball to the proper air pressure so that we could learn how high it would bounce to be able to recognize it when we saw it.
That is, after all, why we bounce the ball in basketball. We're not checking to make sure it bounces straight up (although if it didn't, we obviously wouldn't use the ball); we bounce the ball to make sure it bounces the right distance so we don't get rebounds that go to the ceiling. IOW, we're not checking the shape of the ball, we're checking the air pressure. Agreed, but in volleyball we are not concerned with rebounds, we are concerned with the contact with the players - a soft ball sticking and causing prolonged contact and a hard ball ricocheting too quickly. As such, bouncing the ball off the floor to see how high it bounces doesn't tell us anything about whether the air pressure is correct, too high or too low.
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What you are forgetting is that as basketball officials, we
are familiar with how high the ball will bounce off the floor when the pressure is where we think it should be because we have experienced dribbling the ball during a game. In volleyball, we do not have that reference to fall back on. We don't bounce the ball to see if it will come up to a predetermined height since we would have to have gauged it anyway to find out WHERE that height would be.
Plus, there are times that we have the 3-ball system in use during a match. Bouncing three volleyballs to check their pressure is not an accurate way to determine whether they meet specifications or not. As you well know, basketball NEVER uses 3 different balls during the same game so we don't have a consistent reference point.
Scrapper, I started out as a basketball official and came to volleyball as my last sport. The most important thing I learned is that there are certain parts of the game of volleyball that are not the same as basketball. Checking the air pressure in the game balls is one of those things. I learned that we use a gauge for checking the pressure of volleyballs and we can gauge a basketball by how it bounces when dropped from a certain height. Two different techniques for two different sports. So, bottom line is we don't gauge volleyballs by using the bounce test because we don't have any references as to the proper bounce height to go by. Trust me on this one, Scrapper...we don't just check the ball by bouncing it.