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The Heritage Show: Building British Volleyball from the Ground Up - The Richard Callicott Story
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Welcome to the very first episode of The Heritage Show, a special series in partnership with Volleyball England, dedicated to sharing the stories of key figures who have shaped the sport and given so much to its growth. Through these conversations, we celebrate the legacy of volleyball in England, highlighting the pioneers, visionaries, and unsung heroes who have made a lasting impact.
In this first episode, I’m joined by Richard Callicott OBE, a name synonymous with volleyball leadership in England. As the former Chair of Volleyball England and President of the British Volleyball Federation, Richard has also played influential roles within the FIVB and British Paralympics.
In this first part of our two-part conversation, Richard takes us back to his early days in volleyball—how he introduced the sport to the West Midlands at a time when there were no sports halls, and how he helped develop clubs and associations to ensure volleyball was accessible to all. His passion and drive led him to take on key roles, from International Secretary to Auditor for the European Volleyball Confederation (CEV), always pushing the sport forward.
Richard is a true volleyball visionary, and his influence extends far beyond England. He played a vital role in supporting the London 2012 Olympic mission, advocating for British teams across all three disciplines of the sport. His journey is one of dedication, innovation, and leadership—one that every volleyball fan will love hearing about.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where Richard shares more about his leadership in the British Volleyball Federation, his experiences from London 2012, how he helped bring beach volleyball to the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, and his role in founding the Sandwell Volleyball Tournament. We’ll also reflect on some of the incredible people he’s worked with throughout his journey.
Don’t miss this inspiring conversation with one of England’s most dedicated volleyball figures!
Connecting Through Conversation
That Volleyball Guy.
Speaker 2:Hello, I'm Luke Wiltshire, host of that Volleyball Guy, and if you love volleyball as much as me, then you're in the right place. This is that Volleyball Guy.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Heritage Show in partnership with Volleyball England and as part of the Heritage Project. Now, if you're new to this podcast, this is something different for you. These Heritage Show episodes are going to highlight and focus and spotlight on some of the amazing stories and amazing people that have grown volleyball in the country and really put volleyball on the map and have given so much to our sport, and it's really important that we hear from them, we find out their stories and we give them a chance to share some of their wisdom, knowledge and experience with the volleyball community. It's really important that the true value and potential in this sport is in the people and this is all about sharing and the reason why I set this podcast up at the start was all about sharing stories and just discussing and talking more to move our sport forward.
Speaker 2:So today, for this very, very first episode of the Heritage Show, I am absolutely honoured to be joined by a very, very special guest, someone who has dedicated decades to growing volleyball in England and beyond, first discovering volleyball in 1967, founding his first club, leading a national and international volleyball organisation, served as President of volleyball england and the chair of the british volleyball federation. He's been awarded an obe in 2012 for services to volleyball, mastermind behind the legendary sandwell outdoor volleyball grass tournament and currently the honorary president of volleyball england. The list could go on. There's a lot. There's a load more other things we could have said, but I'm absolutely honoured to be joined today on the show by Richard Calicott. Richard, hello and welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you very much, Luke. Thank you for the introduction. That's very nice.
Speaker 2:There are probably several more bullet points I could have filled of your volleyball experience and all of the things you've done in the sport, but I I thought those ones highlighted all the sort of key, significant roles. But you are someone who has given so much of your time and your life to volleyball so it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show bless you, thank you very much indeed.
Speaker 3:And uh, I mean, okay, I've been involved with the sport for a very long time, but the amazing thing about volleyball is that there's an awful lot of people out there who have also given a great deal of their lives to the development of the sport. Because we believe in it, we're passionate about it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and before we dive into the conversation, perhaps it'd be better, coming from you, talk to us a little bit more about the heritage project that Volleyball England are currently sort of running, and tell us a little bit more about that.
Speaker 3:Well, as I've just alluded to, there's a lot of people that have been around, who are sort of in their 70s and 80s, who have been around since the early days of the Amateur Volleyball Association and the volleyball. Well before Volleyball England became Volleyball England it was the English Volleyball Association and before that it was the Amateur Volleyball Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, northern Ireland. So we've made progress in that lifetime because Scotland, northern Ireland, wales, england have all got their own associations now. So the Heritage Project is about trying not to lose, as you alluded to in your initial opening comments, the expertise, the knowledge, the history of how the sport has evolved in this country, the stages we've gone through and sometimes the pain we've gone through in order to move the sport forward. It's been exciting, it's been very tiring, but I mean when I say to you for younger listeners, in the early days we used to have to.
Speaker 3:There was no such thing as the Internet, there was no such thing as mobile phones. It was all done on spirit duplicators where you wrote onto a piece of paper, put it on a drum, put it through. Not even a photocopier didn't exist. You put it through a spirit duplicator and send it out, send out communications that way, and everything had to go through the post, the phones. The only phone calls were through sets you know British telecom sets as well as, as is now, not through mobiles. No text messaging, no special projects and things like WhatsApp groups and so on. None of that existed. So, to make progress, there were a lot of conversations and a lot of meetings, and this heritage project is to try and capture some, if not all of that and some of the personalities and the characters that have helped to evolve the sport to the state that we're in today.
Speaker 2:Absolutely no. Yeah, you're absolutely spot on, and that's exactly what it's about. And you know, I'm someone who, in order to know where you're going, you've got to know where you've been right, and it's all about understanding the history, like you said, some of the pain, and I cannot wait to dive into this conversation. Of course, it's going to be one of those ones where I look at the clock and all of a sudden it's been an hour. But let's, let's, let's start then, which I tell us about how you got involved in volleyball.
Speaker 3:I'm really curious to know how people find the sport and tell us about the early days of your, of your experience well, in the very early days, um, I went to the Birmingham College of Education to become trained as a PE teacher and we were all sorts, from all over the country, all of us coming in from pretty much traditional sporting backgrounds Mine was cricket and rugby, one or two were gymnasts, one or two were footballers and so on and of course in those days there were no sports halls that could play. So you had the old traditional gyms with wooden wall bars down the sides of the gym. That was the place where you played indoor sport. So sports halls didn't come into existence until the 70s, late 70s and early 80s, um, so a lot of sports that we would have wanted to have played in this country we couldn't have played, even if we'd wanted to, because there were no facilities. And today I know we complain about the lack of facilities in all sorts of places, but in those days there were no facilities. Um. And whilst I was at college, um, in edgbaston in birmingham, um, we had a course, as most p teachers or aspiring p teachers did. You went on every course possible because that was going to help you get your first job. When you left college and a guy comes up from London and some of the referees in our organization will recall, a guy called Ray Carman. Ray came up from London, he was a volleyball referee and he ran a course on how to referee volleyball. So, hey, we're all young, young aspiring teachers, we all joined the course and most of us, if not all of us, became qualified referees, and that was in 1967.
Speaker 3:And that was the sport that I don't know. It was non-contact. You needed to be agile. The quality of play was pretty abysmal, I have to say so. Referees had a field day and it was before today's interpretation of the laws and the rules. Um, the height, yeah, I mean, it was sort of a height, um, but it was pretty a hit and miss. Um, the balls were well, if you were lucky you got a volleyball, otherwise you used a sort of a plastic ball of some sort and it was all very, very hit and miss. But it caught my imagination, and I think mostly it caught my imagination because there was no physical contact and I'd had a lot of injuries playing rugby and that had taken me out of well playing playing rugby, because I couldn't, my knees had gone, as it were. So I was looking for something else to play. So I left college.
Speaker 3:I went to teach in Smethwick, which is now part of Sandwell, and it so happened that there was a guy on the staff who was older than me, quite a lot older than me, in fact who had played volleyball, and Phil had been trained at Wolverhampton Teachers College and Wolverhampton Teachers College and Wolverhampton Teachers College. There was a guy there called Tom Fisher who was a drama lecturer, but Tom knew about volleyball and so, putting all that together, phil and I formed the Worley Teachers Volleyball Club Teachers Volleyball Club, wow. And it so happened that I shared a flat with three other guys, all of whom were PE teachers. So I persuaded Rog, tref and Frank to come and join me and we formed Worley Teachers Volleyball Club and that sort of morphed over time into Worley Phoenix Volleyball Club. And by about the early 1980s there was a sports hall in one of the secondary schools not too far from us and we formed Wally Phoenix and we started to play and I sort of was taking the lead on it.
Speaker 3:And I discovered a club in Coventry, riga Volleyball Club, which was an Asian volleyball club and All-Stars I should say it was All-Stars and Riga Volleyball Club. That was two clubs from Leamington and Coventry as well as a team from Wolverhampton Teachers College and before we knew it we'd got a little league going of four teams and out of that we wrote and got people together and we formed the West Midlands Volleyball Association. And I've still got the minute book from the very first meeting we ever had and all the personalities that were there. And at that time I think there was one lady that was playing volleyball in the West Midlands, jill Portlock. Jill Sintas, as became Jill. She ended up marrying a Greek Cypriot who knew about volleyball and gradually the association grew until we had the West Midlands Volleyball Association and we had leagues going and county associations and counties going and over the next 10 year period that sort of grew it ran in tandem with the you mentioned the Sandwell Volleyball Tournament, but we'll perhaps come on to that shortly volleyball tournament, but we'll perhaps come on to that shortly.
Speaker 3:Um, and we suddenly found that with facilities, youngsters were coming to the clubs who wanted to play something other than the traditional sports either, because they couldn't kick a football, they didn't want to get tackled in rugby and actually their hand-eye coordination for cricket and bowling and hitting a ball with a cricket bat wasn't what they wanted to do, and they found volleyball as something that gave them a huge amount of agility. It gave them hand-ball-eye coordination. It gave them if I can be so crude as to say we sweated playing the sport. So you've got a bit of everything say we sweated playing the sport.
Speaker 2:Um, so you, you've got a bit of everything. It's so interesting hearing you talk about having to find and having to create volleyball for some of the younger listeners or some of the people that have only just joined volleyball. You know volleyball in the last you know, I would say probably, you probably know a lot more about this in statistics than me, but I would say, from my opinion and experience, volleyball in the last five, ten years, especially after Covid, has had a huge increase in participation and that's through a lot of the generation now that are watching this haiku and anime and things like that. But it's not always been like that. Volleyball has been a very yeah, it's not been a very, it's not been one of the mainstream sports in this country, and especially when you were talking about 1967 and before sports halls and things like that, that you had to create volleyball to be able to play volleyball and that to me that's really interesting well it's.
Speaker 3:I mean going way back into the 1940s. Um, people, in order to receive a ball that was being hit towards you, you would set. You would play the ball with what we would call today a set. A set today may well be a sort of a much softer touch and you would play the ball now as it comes to you. But in those days, anyone that still remembers the old Polish teams and the Eastern European teams who were introduced to the sport as a result of the Second World War, found that they would put little slivers of wood down the sides of their fingers to stop their fingers from breaking, because they would. They would play it like that.
Speaker 3:So in the early days that was the way they received the ball, and it wasn't until volleyball got into the Olympic Games in Japan in Tokyo 1964, that the dig pass, as we now call it, was introduced. The Japanese invented it. Up until that point it wasn't part of the game, it wasn't recognized. So it was either serve, hit and volley, and then the japanese introduced the dick pass, um, and that changed the whole nature of the game basically, from that moment on. But it was a lot, a lot easier to be able to take a ball. That was not to cross a net at you or close to you. It gave you a chance to get the ball back up in the air again and before we before.
Speaker 2:Even then, when you're talking, it's clear that you've always been someone who's taken leadership roles. You set up an organization, you set up an association because there was none, and we're going to come on to your leadership experience because that's really interesting. But before we move on to that part of the conversation, I want to know more about you as a player. So talk to me about your what position? What were your strengths as a player? What were your um, yeah, what were your weaknesses and what was your favorite part of the game?
Speaker 3:um, well, I wasn't tall enough. I was about five foot five or eleven. I didn't have a massive vertical jump to be a hitter and, having been used to playing traditional sports, I had a pretty good hand ball eye coordination because of the games that I played. So I settled for being a setter. And so I became a setter and, yeah, I think over the course of my playing career I got better at it as I learned more and I I I'm not a gymnast. So whereas you've got people like Richard Dobell and Barry Swan, who were outstanding setters I mean the best we've ever we've we've seen in this country I would suggest I didn't have their agility, their flexibility, their ability to go backwards and play the ball in front of them that way. I needed a ball here so I could, I could play it. Way. I needed a ball here so I could, I could play it. Um, but yes, so I set and and my playing career um, having four moorey teachers and then moorey phoenix.
Speaker 3:I then set up a club at a leisure center in san juan called hayden hill leisure center in cradley heath, and from there we entered the national. We played west midlands. We entered the national league. We got into league. We went up through the leagues and we missed out on, I think, points difference as opposed to sets difference for getting promoted to what was then division one, and the club that went up ahead of us was sale volleyball club and we we had a very good side because I was I was attracting players from the university of birmingham who had a good side and they were playing serious volleyball and playing in bucks competitions and we had, and I had, a couple of german lads that came over for various things.
Speaker 3:I had an american that came over who was a Mormon, who came and played and we actually managed to get a very good side together and we just missed out on points. And I often wonder what would have happened had we gone up into Division One and played with the Sparks and the Southgates and the Regas as it was then. But yes, anyway, that's my own career, I enjoyed it. But my knee injury has finally caught up with me um and a lot of cartilage operations. I had them all removed and I've had double figures of knee operations over the years, um, and so I I ended up just coaching um and I. I then got a job working in London, which was one of the proudest moments of my life to get that job. It meant I couldn't coach and train and whatever, but I've managed to keep my administrative roles together, as it were.
Speaker 2:Wow, so you've alluded there, you know a player, a coach. Wow, so you've alluded there, you know a player, a coach. But I think the bit that we really want to get down to is your leadership experience leading national governing bodies, british Volleyball Federation. So you sort of alluded to it then that you set up the East Midlands Sorry, was it East Midlands, west Midlands Volleyball Association you mentioned. You've still got the minutes. You seem like someone who's got all his books in order and kept all of his records. What was on the agenda? I'm interested to know what was on the agenda in that first meeting.
Speaker 3:Competitions and coaching courses. And we ran a coaching course then at Keele University with a guy called Gus Nabney who was the head of physical education at the University of Keele in North Staffordshire, and it corresponded with the time that Stoke City Football Club in those days were quite good. In those days were quite good and they had a young goalkeeper called Gordon Banks who went on to play for England and whatever, and George Easton and so on, and actually they used to go to the Kiwi university sports hall and play volleyball. So it was established that that was one of their sports. So we ran a coaching course and we tried to get people to come on it and I managed to get the West Midlands Sports Council to fund it, because then Sport England, as was used to be called the Sports Council, and the Sports Council looked after everything in England and everything that pertained to British, which was a bit unfair because we used to feel that Scotland, wales, northern Ireland got a better deal out of that than England did. So I learned very early on that if you want to make change you've not only got to show that you're willing to make change, but you've got to be quick in your thinking, you've got to have a strategy of what you want to achieve. Why are you achieving? Are you attempting to do X, y and Z? What will that lead to if you could achieve it, and how do you measure it? So those were the key drivers, if you like, as to what we wanted to try and achieve.
Speaker 3:We wanted to popularize the sport. We wanted to find a way of getting more young people into the sport and we were fairly successful across the west midlands. We were running schools, leagues and we were running all sorts, and it was mostly because we managed to persuade pe teachers or teachers to start up volleyball. Um, and that meant, yeah, a lot of personal contact. As I said right at the start, there was no such thing as all the modern technology that we have today that we can communicate with each other. It was on the phone, or literally pop round to the local secondary school or take part in something, and it was surprisingly successful and we made good progress for a number of years and we've made good progress for a number of years, wow, interesting.
Speaker 2:I could dig into all of that stuff, but I want to start talking now about your involvement at a bigger level, bigger picture level. So obviously, as I mentioned at the start, you've been president of Volleyball England. Talk us through your journey, because I'm sure it is a journey into leading um, the national governing body for volleyball in England. And yeah, just tell it talk, talk, start.
Speaker 3:Let's start this conversation okay, the old national executive council, as it was called, of volleyball in England. Well, they used to meet in London but they used to also meet at Luton College and one of the guys who was a major international influence, neville Lewis, was a lecturer at Luton College. So we used to meet at Luton College. So for a young PE teacher fresh out of teacher training, college teaching in Smedic, I used to get in my old Morris Minor and go down through Coventry, down the M1, get off at Newton, go to a meeting, because in those days one person from each region was invited to sit on the executive council. There was nobody else. So I used to represent the west midlands um and occasionally we'd meet in london at sports council offices, um, down in knightsbridge, and that was a big adventure because I either had to go on the train or, uh, and of course there were no expenses in those days. So when you were on um a teacher's salary in those days everything you counted your pennies, yeah, um, and that was. That was a challenge to try and get to these meetings, because that meant you put your own money into the petrol tank and there was nobody else to be able to claim that cost of the petrol back now. I know petrol was much, much cheaper in those days. But when you're trying to run a morris minor split screen, morris minor, um, it wasn't that easy way one, because the cars didn't go so fast and b the roads weren't there. So the m6 didn't exist, for example, from m1 going across through the West Midlands and going up to the North West it wasn't there. So you had to go through Wright and Undones more and the edges of Coventry and so on. But all of that started so in attending these national executive meetings. There was an AGM, and I think it was at Luton, but I couldn't swear to it and I suddenly found myself elected by those that were present as international secretary. Wow, nobody knew what that really meant. But we had a general secretary, we had a chairman, so we had people like Dan Dingle and Terry Jones and Roy Pankhurst, neville Lewis and Peter Wardale. They were around, but they were much older, much older to a young man like me.
Speaker 3:Anyway, I became international secretary. It was primarily to try and see what we could do with national squads and to try and get some fixtures together, um, and to play some games. And I remember my first trip with the squad because we used to then send. We used to get some money from the sports council and we would send a squad. It was all relatively local, um. My first international experience was in luxembourg and I shared a room with a guy called mike warwick who was from south london, a lecturer at putney college, and we had a. We had a good team, a good team and there were some tall guys in it too. Um, but we had a that was putney college and that was um, uh, associated with spark and southgate. That were probably the two top clubs of the era, um and the pl, and we gradually got luffborough rockets involved, so left for rockets were and riga, so gradually the number of teams that were producing half-decent players were coming up with some competition at national level.
Speaker 2:Was that under the English umbrella or the British umbrella?
Speaker 3:No, by now we were very firmly England, because the Scots basically complained over the fact that the Amateur Volleyball Association of Great Britain in Northern Ireland was concentrating on England and it didn't seem to do anything for them north of the border. Yeah, I think there was some truth in that. So they broke away, became the Scottish Volleyball Association. So they broke away and became the Scottish Volleyball Association and that meant England had nowhere else to go but to become Volleyball England. But then it was still called the Amateur Volleyball Association and that was. We lived in that with that for many years as the AVA and we played matches. I can remember again 1973. It's ingrained on my memory.
Speaker 3:I agreed, partly because I was international secretary, to put on a match in Birmingham and we were due to play Sweden men in Birmingham. But there was only one sports hall in the whole of the west midlands, in birmingham in particular, and that was at the university of birmingham. Um, and so I went to the university of birmingham and said look, can we play a volleyball match here? Volleyball, what do you mean? Volleyball? I mean explain what it was all about. I said well, we need some posts in the net. Oh, haven't got any posts. Well, could you, could you get some posts put in If we bring the match to you? Oh, I don't know about that. So I had to pay A local sports company, sports goods company and shop. I paid them To go and put some posts in at the University of Birmingham and buy a net to go with it, in order that we could put the match on in the sports hall at the University of Birmingham Do?
Speaker 2:you remember the score.
Speaker 3:No, I've got a record of it. Yes, somewhere I think Sweden beat us 3-1. Pretty good. But somebody like Barry Swan, I'm sure, or Leszek Zarzycki they would be able to correct me on that or Nick Keeley might, or even Spud Mosley might. But yes, they were better than us, but then they'd been playing a lot longer and were playing in facilities and our boys didn't have the facilities or the training and they were all amateurs anyway. And of course, sweden went on in the 80s to become world champions and so on. They became a really good side under a local club and they had the coach that coached the club and the club was basically the national team. But then that went on much later.
Speaker 3:So I think the lack of facilities was a major holding back the development of the sport, and it wasn't just us. Basketball we're able to play a bit more in a gym. Yeah, um, handball didn't exist. Um, there was no handball. Nobody played handball. It didn't. It wasn't there. Badminton that was the only sport that was really recognized as being a sport that was played with a roof.
Speaker 3:So trying to find how we got to sports halls was a major move, and the politics involved in trying to make that happen meant that some of us made a real effort to get in touch with people of influence, not so much the local authorities, but more to do with the sports councils and with that, people like Roy, who's still down in Bournemouth area, roy Pankhurst, neville Lewis no longer with us, peter Wardale not with us were working for the sports council and they were able to bring quite a lot of influence in the development of the sport through the 70s and into the 80s.
Speaker 3:Um, I'm I found one of the things that I tried to do as international secretary was to get involved and to understand what was happening in Europe, what was happening in the FIVB, and often communicating again, and it was letters I mean handwritten letters or typed, if you were lucky, on one of these portable typewriters, or a spirit-duplicated letter, and it was difficult, um, and I went to my first european congress I'm trying to think of the year and I was a young englishman and suddenly they elected me european congress, they elected me to the position of auditor of the European Confederation, and the offices for you at the CV in those days were held in Brussels and they had one person that worked full time and his name was Olivier Bruyere, a French, belgian, and he just kept the office going and there were commissions and whatever of volunteers, but there was one person working for europe.
Speaker 2:Wow, um and I sorry as I said, there's a theme here, though rich, where you find yourself in meetings and, all of a sudden, you find yourself elected. Is that a theme that carried on throughout your leadership career?
Speaker 3:Yeah, probably that, and I was a willing horse. I think you can't force somebody to take on something that they don't want to do, and I learned a long time ago that, yes, I was willing to take things on. And secondly, perhaps I wasn't very good at saying no when I should have done, and I probably have learned later in life that actually there are times when you need to say no to taking on something, because if you take on too much much, you do a lot of things very badly are there any roles?
Speaker 2:and I know we're gonna probably move on to sort of eva volleyball england and start talking about that transition. But are there any roles? Then putting you on the spot here where, on reflection, you probably should have said, no, you weren't the right guy. You said that you, you learn. I'm interested to find out if there's any sort of moment or title where you think, oh, I'm not the right guy for this I.
Speaker 3:I think that came but much, much later, um, much, much more recent in my. But there was a time when in the early 70s sorry, the early 80s I took on, I was chairman of volleyball in England and I took on the organization of the Spring Cup. And the Spring Cup may be something that is something, a name that's new to a lot of people, something that is something, a name that's new to a lot of people. The spring cup was a competition for west european nations to play volleyball, both for men and women, and the reason it was run was because the most powerful nations in europe guess where were in eastern europe? Um, because were Virtually semi-professional and they won everything. The Spring Cup Was a competition which Would probably involve 15, 16, 17 Countries and we would all go to one other country and there would be a podium charged and so on. And we did the Spring Cup in Birmingham and by now some schools had come along and we got some sports halls. And when we took it on in the early 80s in retrospect I probably shouldn't have done it it was good for the sport because we got it sponsored by Cafe Haag, so, and it was covered by television because they were looking for something a bit different and then, with the then national director, we were starting to run tournaments. We ran one tournament, what was then called the Aston Villa Leisure Centre, and it was a 14 tournament for men and we would do a 14 tournament for women somewhere in the greater London area, from Harlow, bracknell, right the way down to Alexandra Palace or even Crystal Palace. So I think, yeah, I mean we were trying to popularize the sport and it worked to a large degree. I think we were still. We were still establishing who was prepared to take on what roles, and so you've got people like ron richards, who had started and was vice chairman um to my chairmanship. Ron stayed with us, did a brilliant job and he actually ended up what he still does. He's still the secretary of the Southwest and he does an outstanding job and has done all the way through his career.
Speaker 3:We had a very good guy called Ray Tingley who was from Speedwell. Speedwell School in Bristol Was one of the, if not the top school for volleyball in England and they won everything and Ray was a teacher there. But he got a job down in Cowplane in Hampshire and he became he was also a vice chairman. Sadly, we lost Ray he yes, he died very far, far too young, but an outstanding piece and to try and find the balance between somebody with this strength and to balance that up with somebody with a different strength, so that you've got the right balance and you've got the right people to bounce off and to question should we be doing this? Should we be doing that?
Speaker 3:There was another good guy, brian Kendall, who again passed. Brian was a teacher in Merseyside and was doing what I was doing in the West Midlands, or trying to. He was doing up in the Northwest, the northwest, um. And yeah, brian was chairman of what was then called the english schools volleyball association and, to be politically correct, even in those days, we thought, some of us, that actually it would be a good thing if we had the English schools and the governing body of English volleyball as one body, albeit with different sections. John Close was then chairman. He was at Northwood Sports Centre in Stoke.
Speaker 3:So we had a series of meetings over a long period of time trying to get it right, and so we formed a schools commission as part of English volleyball and we were able to go to the sports council and say, look, we are one governing body. We look after volleyball for men and women, we look after volleyball for those with a disability as well as those who are able bodied, and we've got schools as part of the one body. And that was the model, and so I was projecting us as being the model that governing bodies of sport in this country should follow. And to some extent it had its impact, because we started yet funding in a much more realistic way from the then Sports Council, and it was still the Sports Council up until 1996, 97. And it was still the Sports Council up until 1996, 97. So it was leading.
Speaker 3:But, we had a vision. We knew what we wanted to try and achieve and to do that we needed to run tournaments to give our best players the opportunity to play and to show what they could do. Beach volleyball was still in its infancy in this country and there were no facilities. There was no beach volleyball courts anywhere. The only beach volleyball there was Was probably in Bournemouth and Boscombe and along the south coast, but we'll come on to that shortly.
Speaker 2:Now interesting. You've really highlighted how you've grown into. You know how you evolved the sport and then into leadership roles and I mean we could talk for hours about this stuff but it'd be great to find out more than about the eva moving into the voible england and that era and your involvement in that era. I know there's probably a load of other stuff in between that we can't fit in, but I'm just curious to find out more about some of the sort of your recent history, if that makes sense.
Speaker 3:The evolution of the sport and professionally was when we employed our first ever professional officer who happened to be Canadian, a Canadian guy called Barry McGregor. Barry had a little office in West Bridgeford, nottingham, because Peter Wardale, who was one of our vice presidents, worked for the Sports Council in the East Midlands and was able to help us and make things happen. Barry moved on back to Canada after a period of time and was replaced with Eileen Pratt, who helped to build the sport in terms of organization, and then we used the grant money that we were getting from the sports council for administration. We managed to persuade them to say look, can we use that money to buy a property?
Speaker 3:Well yeah, nobody's tried it before, but I don't see why not they said so we bought West Bridgeford and we bought the offices and the bakery at the back of that and started up Volley Shop with a lad called David Joy who went on to even greater fame from us. He went on to become chief executive of British Canoeing and Scottish Athletics and so on, and we ran the building in West Bridgeford until they sold it. And they sold it and with the money that they sold they then moved into the new development which is now Loughborough. Loughborough meant that they moved into offices and they were paying rent and they were still getting grand and they were able to use that money just to pay the rent, but they still had a lump sum in the bank which was helpful. And all that happened in the sort of mid 90s I wasn't chairman but in the mid 90s and late 90s, and that took us into the millennium I suppose 2000 plus At which point we suddenly found in 2005, the then chief executive of Volleyball England.
Speaker 3:By now they'd constitutionalised the structures so that we now had Volleyball England as opposed to amateur volleyball, et cetera, et cetera, and we actually had offices and we had staff and George Boorman had taken us through that period of the 90s, 80s and 90s and now Tom Ajassu, volleyball England were running into a few issues and Tom, who's ex Riga um was chief exec and actually oversaw us moving to Loughborough and whatever um, we suddenly discovered that, well, actually, if we wanted to move forward, um, I was now no longer. I wasn't doing anything. Actually at that point I'd I'd moved um, I'd gone from being professionally. I was the head of sport for birmingham and I was running the national indoor arena in birmingham, and then I went from there to become chief executive of UK Sport and I was obviously asking all sorts of difficult questions of my colleagues and my staff why aren't we funding volleyball? That's another issue. I left UK Sport in 2004 and Tom and one or two others came knocking on my door and said look, we need a chairman. So I agreed to become chairman again.
Speaker 3:So from 2004, I took on the mantle of chairing Volleyball England and then in 2005, as I knew was coming because I'd been at UK Sport, we were bidding for the Olympic Games. How do we proceed? Well, we can only proceed as British Volleyball because we've got to be Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We've got to be one team. How do we do that? So I can remember we had a meeting at Loughborough. We had a good turnout where we explained to those that were present what that meant. This wasn't England. This had to be England, scotland, northern Ireland and Wales. And we recognised that we were going to have to restructure things and we were having to bring the British Volleyball Federation back. Well, who was going to do that? Nobody came forward.
Speaker 2:I can sense there's a pattern here. I can imagine what happened next.
Speaker 3:I ended up doing both Englandland and british, and doing both meant I had to be very, very careful to make sure that it wasn't just england and that it was, it was british. So I insisted that we have meetings in cardiff, meetings in Belfast, meetings in Edinburgh or Stirling, as well as meetings in London, and we formed a new organisation. In effect, it theoretically already existed, but it wasn't doing anything. We appointed Wayne Coyle as our general manager for British Volleyball. And where did Wayne live? He lived in Sheffield.
Speaker 3:It was a lot easier because he had a lot of contacts in Sheffield, because he'd worked for recreation and events in Sheffield, that we were able to use the sports hall at the English Institute of Sport in the Don Valley in Sheffield. So we had an office there and then we appointed an assistant to help. And then we had to go through the rigmarole that's the wrong word, but we had to go through the process of appointing coaches and by now we'd got. We had to fight yes, I'm going to say it. We had to fight the. I'm going to say it. We had to fight the, the um, the institutions of sport, to make sure that we, as volleyball, were going to be competing in the olympic and the paralympic games yeah they didn't want it.
Speaker 3:They didn't want it. They only wanted to fund those sports that had a real chance of winning a medal, almost a guaranteed chance of winning a medal.
Speaker 2:Well, we fought that battle and I was gonna say, you know, being frank, like it's not big, it wasn't, it still isn't a huge sport in the country. It's getting bigger. But like, so, how did you? I'm really interested to know how did you fight that battle? How did you get the the uh, the green light to forget gb at the london 2012 olympics, for both indoor and beach, and paralympics?
Speaker 3:I'll be brutally honest and I'm sure this won't go any further than this broadcast. Um, I was. I was sitting on the national um olymp Council. I was representing volleyball. I also happened to be a director of the British Paralympic Association, so I would turn up to British Paralympic meetings as well and, with a bit of support, which I'd pre-programmed, I proposed that for the British Olympic Association should take every sport that was an Olympic sport and put a team in to those Olympic competitions, and the same for Paralympics. And that was passed and it was agreed by the assembly of all the representatives of the different sports.
Speaker 3:I have to say my old organization, uk Sport, were far from happy with this and they tried to block us to the extent that not only did they try to block us, they threatened us that if we didn't give up pursuing the women's indoor volleyball and the women's sitting volleyball, they would stop our funding for the games. Quite deplorable and I was ashamed of them. Well, by now we'd got our coaches in. We'd brought in Lorne Sawula from Canada for the women's coach, because I knew Lorne over a period of time and he was very good. We brought in Matt from Australia to coach the beach teams and they were based at Bath University.
Speaker 3:We came down to Bournemouth and I talked with Jeff Jeff Allen. We went to Bournemouth University and said to them would you host the British beach volleyball teams and the training? We bring the training to you, et cetera. And their director of estates didn't want to play. So we took it to Bath because it was the relatively nearest to the south coast where there was beach, and we even built some beach courts at bath university out of the grant money that we were getting from uk sport richard I.
Speaker 2:I know them well because I grew up 10 miles away from bath and I played on those back on those beach volleyball, did you? Oh, indeed, yeah, just around that time with Morph. Morph yeah yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 3:So yes, we had that period, and then of course, the men and women were training in Sheffield. So the downside was that the indoor teams were training in Sheffield, the beach were training in Bath and the Paralympic squads the sitting programmes were in London. They were training down in Rhodes in South London. That volleyball guy.
Speaker 2:Well, that was part one of my amazing conversation with Richard Calicott. What an absolute gentleman, an inspiration and someone who is clearly so passionate about our sport in England and has done so much for the sport over so many years over so many years. So inspirational to hear his stories, listen to some of the experiences he's had and how he's helped to shape volleyball in England. Join me for part two, then, where I will carry on talking to Richard about his experience with the FIVB, taking volleyball into the London 2012 Olympics and what that was like, his role as president and chair of the BVF, and then we'll finish the conversation talking to Richard about his opinions on volleyball now and where volleyball was going in this country. So join me for part two. You won't want to miss it. A really, really amazing guy with so many stories to share, and I honestly cannot wait to share the second part with you. Remember, whatever you're doing, keep playing, keep supporting, but, most importantly, keep that volleyball spirit alive.
Speaker 2:I'm Luke Wiltshire, the host of that Volleyball Guy. Thank you for listening. This is that Volleyball Guy.
