I am surprised no one here talks about volleyball, despite the fact that it is one of the last sports in America to have majority white teams and where the caste effect isnt as pronounced.
Not sure where you’re located, my friend, but I’ll offer a little preface to any non-American readers. In the USA, we have a few “civil rights” laws that have bottled up popular sports.
Our ‘Title IX’ law is aimed at gender parity in university. Every university must offer the same number of scholarships to men and women for sports. You cannot offer scholarships to women for cheerleading or baking or vaccuuming: it must be for a sport. Football is the most popular US sport, and that takes up 85 male scholarships. That usually means that a university with a football team has to also have 4 or 5 women’s sports teams without a male counterpart.
Similar in age, ‘Griggs vs Duke Power’ was a Supreme Court case ruled on in 1971. Griggs, a dumb black guy, sued his employer, an electrical company, because he kept getting passed over for promotion by younger white guys who would lap him on the internal aptitude test. The court ruled that this was racial discrimination, and there must be a more substantial reason why a white would be promoted over a black. This created our current system of credentialism, where companies require certain college degrees and GPAs so that they are not legally liable to include the very dumbest blacks as candidates.
So now, more than 50 years later, athletic men of any color have no incentive to play volleyball here beyond a love for the game. The very best will funnel into other sports where they can reap a reward. Without a professional path, volleyball is simply a club sport and pastime. It would benefit from more TV coverage, but those choices are made for us, way above the consumer level.
That’s why volleyball isn’t more popular in the USA. The college chicks are super hot, though!