History of Basketball

The history of basketball starts with James Naismith.

James Naismith left many diaries and interviews that explain how and when he created basketball. Massachusetts had cold winters, and people wanted a game that could be played inside. Naismith was a Canadian teacher, born in Almonte, Ontario on the 16th of November, 1861. Naismith was an orphan from early in his life, and his uncle led him to study Hebraism and philosophy, to train to become a priest. He graduated from McGill University, Montreal, in 1887 (it was the first graduation of eleven), but at the college he discovered sports: he played in the rugby team for eight years, even when he studied at the Presbyterian College in Montreal. But he dropped out in 1890, to become a teacher at the InternationalYoung Men’s Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts.

There, physical educators Luther Gulick and Frank Peters asked him to invent a new indoor game, which could be played during the cold winter. He also made it for a physical education class to play. He started work on it in December 1891. He wrote that he took some ideas from other sports: when he was young, he played with his friends a game called "Duck on a Rock." In this game, one boy guarded his “duck” from the stones of the others; and the fun began as the boys gathered their stray shots. It was this game that was later to play such an important part in the origin of basketball. The first game was played on December 29, 1891.