One of my favorite things to do in the spring was to field a co-ed intramural (IM) volleyball team of social psychology graduate students (and also organizational psych students). We didn't have a team my first spring (1985), but did in '86, '87, '88, and '89.
Southern California is the hotbed of U.S. volleyball, where people grow up playing on the beach. Besides myself, others in the Michigan social psych program hailing from this region, who played one or more years on the IM team, included post doc Pete Ditto and grad student Kari Edwards. Org psych grad student Susan Hatter was from L.A. and had played volleyball for Swarthmore (Pennsylvania) as an undergrad. Social psych grad student Eric Lang was from even further west, Hawaii.
Some of the social psych grad students from the Midwest were also good. I remember seeing Paula Niedenthal, who went to undergrad college at Wisconsin, playing volleyball one year at the social psych program's beginning-of-the-school-year picnic and I knew I had to recruit her for the team. Steve Spencer, who came from Hope College in western Michigan, lent some height to the team; Steve's wife Shelly appeared to be an experienced, well-trained volleyball player and was a major asset the years she played.
Two additional organizational psych grad students who joined in with us were Philippe Byosiere and Helen Robillard.
(I hope I'm not omitting anyone; I'll certainly update this entry to add anyone I missed.)
Our games were played in the Intramural Building, a nice walk south several blocks from the heart of central campus on State St., then off on a side street.
Our games were always played on midweek evenings and afterwards, we frequently went to the Cottage Inn on William St. (near the Institute for Social Research, where we had our social psych offices) for pizza and whatever one's favorite beverage was.
In the early years of the team, we used to practice on weekends, but as time went on and we all got busier, we stopped doing so. I don't remember exactly what our records were in the IM competition, but I think we probably won at least as often as we lost.
Naturally, teams had to use three men and three women at all times. An additional rule was that, if a team used its full complement of three hits during a given possession (to try to dig, set, and spike the ball), a female player had to contact the ball at least once. One year, in honor of this rule, we named our team "She's Gotta Hit It," a play on a Spike Lee movie title from the same era, She's Gotta Have It.
Volleyball is probably as team-oriented a sport as any. Unlike in basketball, football, soccer, and hockey, where individual players can hold the ball (or puck) for several seconds at a time, volleyball players must perpetually and instantaneously direct the ball to a teammate (or hit it over the net). More so than in these other sports, volleyball players must have a constant awareness of their teammates' locations, creating an enhanced level of interdependence. In retrospect, it seems fitting for a team of social and organizational psychologists to gravitate to volleyball.