Basketball Invented

In December 1891, James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor, introduced a new indoor game at the International Young Men's Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Played with a soccer ball and two peach baskets fixed to the walls of a gymnasium, it became basketball, one of the most widely played team sports in the world.

The game grew out of a practical problem. New England winters kept students indoors, and the school's required gymnastics classes, heavy on calisthenics and drills, bored many of them. Luther Gulick, head of the school's physical education department, asked Naismith to devise an engaging indoor activity that could be played in limited space and would keep students fit between the football and baseball seasons. Naismith, who had played rugby and other games in Canada, considered what made existing sports appealing and what made them rough. He concluded that a game without running with the ball, and with a horizontal goal placed above head height, would reduce tackling and physical collisions.

Naismith wrote out a set of thirteen original rules, which emphasized passing, prohibited carrying the ball, and banned striking opponents. The goals were peach baskets nailed to the balcony railing, about ten feet above the floor. Accounts agree the height was set by the gym's layout, and it remains the standard today. Early on, the bottom of the basket was not open, so someone had to retrieve the ball after each score; the practice of cutting out the bottom came later. The number of players in the first game is often given as nine per side, though sources differ on details of that first match, including the final score.

The sport spread quickly through the YMCA network, and through colleges, schools and, soon after, women's programs. Senda Berenson adapted the rules for women at Smith College in the 1890s. Professional leagues emerged in the early twentieth century, and basketball became part of the Olympic program for men in 1936, with women's competition added in 1976. Naismith himself later worked at the University of Kansas, where he helped develop the school's program.

Today, basketball is played by hundreds of millions of people, and professional competitions such as the NBA draw a global audience. Its origins as a deliberately designed game, created to solve a specific educational problem, make it unusual among major sports, most of which evolved gradually from folk traditions. Naismith's original rules are now preserved as a treasured historical document.