Competing out of Kagawa Prefectural Sakaide High School, Japanese volleyball player Tsutomu Koyama helped his team capture the 1953 All Japan High School Championship. From there he moved on to Kwansei Gakuin University where he aided in the institution’s victory at the 1956 All Japan Intercollegiate Volleyball Championship. Following graduation he joined the Fujifilm Planets and eventually attended the 1964 Summer Olympics, where he won a bronze medal alongside his team and played in nine matches.
Following his retirement from active competition, Koyama remained in the sport as a coach and, in 1972, was selected as the head coach of Japan’s national men’s volleyball squad. He held the position through 1976, when he coached the team at that year’s Summer Olympics to a fourth place finish. He then shifted to the administrative side of the sport, sitting on the board of directors for the Japanese Volleyball Association from 1973 through 1977 and again from 1983 and 1995 (in the capacity of executive director from 1989). He had one more stint as head coach of the national team, from 1986 through 1988 inclusive of their 10th place finish at the 1988 Summer Olympics, before giving up coaching for good. He was a managing director with the Japanese Volleyball Association until his death in July 2012, aged 75, from esophageal cancer.
Japan