New Zealand

Sports House, in Albany on Auckland's North Shore, is where New Zealand's men gather to train for a sport that gives them no home ground in the usual sense — the fixtures that count are played on the other side of the world, in Asia, not across the Tasman or the Pacific.

That is because Volleyball New Zealand, formed in 1967 and admitted to the International Volleyball Federation in 1970, chose to enter its senior men's team in the Asian Volleyball Confederation rather than Oceania. Australia remains the team's closest rival in practice, met in Oceania qualifiers even though the continental championship itself is contested further north.

The Volley Blacks' best showing in that championship came at their very first attempt, in Melbourne in 1975, when they finished seventh. Across the next ten editions, played up to 2005, nothing came closer — results ranged down to eighth in 1983 and as low as fifteenth in 2005, and no medal has ever followed at the Asian Championship, the Asian Games or the Oceania Championships.

Sebastián González Moreno has coached the side since April 2024, with Johann Timmer as captain. Among the squad, Billy Johnstone stands out less for his playing days, which began as junior captain, than for what followed them: he went on to found the Aotearoa Volleyball Academy. In 2025 the team travelled to Bahrain and then India for the AVC Men's Nations Cup, finishing eleventh and tenth.

Fifty years on from that Melbourne debut, the seventh-place finish still stands unmatched.