A First Assessment on How Covid-19 Affects Volleyball and Other Team Sports

The year 2020 will be remembered by athletes and especially by all volleyball people as the arrival year of  coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 and the Covid-19 pandemic that followed. As we already observe every day, Covid-19  has affected and still affects almost everyone and every part of society as well as sports. The pandemic and the  undertaken actions in order to deal with the pandemic caused serious upheavals in the sports structure in team  sports as in volleyball tooand made very visiblepre-existing systemic weaknesses.While in many parts of the  world, initially the situation seemed to improve as governments, organizations and groups found and implemented  increasingly effective strategies however the second wave of the pandemic found the European Confederations of  team sports and the Confédération Européenne de Volleyball (CEV) unprepared to face a bleak reality. The  challenges are many, more and more volleyball players, coaches’, stakeholders are getting sick from the virus,  and games or championships are being canceled and the implications for policy are briefly discussed.

Keywords: pandemic covid-19, teams sports, volleyball.