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The Invention of Basketball
Basketball was invented in the United States at what is now Springfield College,
Massachusetts. At the time Springfield College was the International YMCA Training
School and the game was first introduced to a class of trainee YMCA Leaders.
At the time there was a need for a gymnasium activity to offset the flagging
interest in apparatus work and freestanding exercise used during the winter
months. Canadian Dr. James Naismith, one of the staff at the college, in an
effort to make his classes more appealing, introduced various recreational games,
such as Association Football, American Football and Lacrosse but each game presented
a problem in the confined space of the 65" x 45"(20m x 14m) Springfield
YMCA gymnasium. Naismith gave this problem a considerable amount of thought
and decided that the solution lay in taking different factors from known games
and combining them to produce a new game. The main features of the game invented
by Naismith were:
- a team game
- a ball handling game without the use of any implement
- he ball was easy to handle, round, light and difficult to conceal
- a game played indoors
- no tackling
- to offset the no tackling, players were not permitted to run with the ball
- skill required to score, therefore, the target was placed above head height
- equal opportunity for each team
- game that demanded skill rather than strength to succeed
- game easy to learn
- a game anybody could play
The first game of Basketball was played in mid-December 1891 at the YMCA gymnasium
in Springfield. The goals for this game were peach baskets fixed to the balcony
at each end of the gymnasium. Naismith, with a Physical Education Class of 18
members, tried out the game so first game was between two teams of nine a side.
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