How Basketball Was Invented

It was the winter of 1891-1892. Inside the International YMCA Training School located in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, there was a group of restless college students. The young men had to be there; they were required to participate in indoor activities to burn off the energy that had been building up since the summer sports season had ended. The college offered them activities such as marching, gymnastic exercises and apparatus work, but they considered them poor substitutes for the more exciting games that they played outside in warmer seasons.

The instructor of this class was James Naismith, a 31-year-old graduate student. Naismith had recently moved from his native Canada to study physical education at the Springfield college and is today renowned as the father of physical education and recreation in the United States.

Two instructors had already tried and failed to devise activities that would engage the young men. There had been a meeting of college teaching staff to discuss what was becoming a persistent problem with the students’ uncontrolled energy and disinterest in their studies. Naismith felt that the kind of work needed to motivate and inspire the students "should be of a recreative nature, something that would appeal to their play instincts". Before the end of the meeting, Gullick placed the problem squarely in Naismith’s lap, and charged him with the task of coming up with a solution.

So Naismith went to work. His challenge was to create a game that was easy to learn, yet complex enough to be interesting. It had to be playable in the winter in the college gymnasium, and by a large number of players all at once. It should give people sufficient exercise, yet without the roughness of outdoor games such as rugby, as players would be likely to end up with injuries if they played such games in a confined space.

Much time and thought went into this new creation. It became an adaptation of many sports of its time, adopting features of games including American rugby, passing the ball; English rugby, the technique known as jump ball; and soccer, the shape and size of the ball. It also adopted something from a game called "duck on a rock", which Naismith had played with his childhood friends.

Naismith approached the college janitor, hoping he could find two small square boxes to use as goals. Instead, the janitor came back with two baskets that had contained peaches from the school canteen. Naismith then nailed them to an elevated track, 10 feet, or 3 meters, from the ground. A man was stationed at each end of the balcony to pick the ball out of the basket and put it back into play. It wasn’t until a few years later that the bottoms of the baskets were cut to let the ball fall loose.

Naismith then drew up 13 rules, which described the method of moving the ball and what constituted a foul, among other issues. The game, he decided, would be divided into two 15-minute halves with a five-minute resting period in between.

Naismith’s secretary typed up the rules and tacked them on the bulletin board. A short time later, the class met, and the teams were chosen with three centers, three forwards, and three guards per side. Two of the centers met at mid-court, Naismith tossed the ball, and a new game was born.

A short while later, Frank Mahan, one of the players, approached Naismith, asking him what he intended to call his new game. Naismith replied that he hadn’t thought of it because he had been focused on just getting the game started. Mahan suggested that it be called "Naismith ball", at which Naismith laughed, saying that a name like that would kill any game. Mahan then said, "Why not call it basketball?" Naismith replied, "We have a basket and a ball, and it seems to me that would be a good name for it."

Word of the new game spread like wildfire. It was an instant success. The rules were printed in the college’s magazine, which was mailed to other YMCA schools across the country. Because of the college’s well-represented international student body, the game of basketball was introduced to many other nations in a relatively short period of time. High schools and colleges around the world began to play the new game, and by 1905, basketball was officially recognized as a permanent winter sport.

The rules have been slightly altered, but by and large the game has not changed drastically since Naismith’s original list of 13 rules was tacked up on that college bulletin board.