Unit 5 · An Indoor Winter Game

Ball games are very old. In Mexico and Central America, people built stone ballcourts more than 3,000 years ago. The Great Ball Court at Chichén Itzá has a stone ring set high on each wall.

That Mesoamerican game used a heavy rubber ball. Players struck it with their hips, not their hands. It had religious meaning for the Maya and other peoples. It was played for many centuries before Europeans arrived.

Basketball did not grow from that game. Historians call it an invention because one person made it on purpose. Naismith later said he borrowed an idea from Duck on a Rock, a stone-tossing game from his Canadian childhood.

The YMCA means the Young Men’s Christian Association. George Williams started it in London in 1844. It came to Boston in 1851. Soon many American cities had a YMCA building.

Many YMCA buildings had a gym. The YMCA needed trained leaders to run them. A school in Springfield, Massachusetts, prepared those leaders. It later became Springfield College.

Students there studied the Bible, the body and physical training. When they graduated, they took jobs at YMCAs across the country. That job path later carried basketball far from Springfield.

James Naismith was born in 1861 near Almonte, Ontario, in Canada. His parents died when he was a boy. An uncle raised him on a farm. He played outdoor games with other children there.

Naismith studied at McGill University in Montreal. He played rugby and other sports there. He planned to become a minister. Then he decided he could help young people through sport and exercise.

In 1890 he moved to the YMCA training school in Springfield. He studied there and also taught classes. In December 1891 he was about 30 years old and still new to teaching.

Luther Gulick led physical education at the Springfield school. In the fall of 1891, one class was unhappy. Its members were grown men training to be YMCA leaders. They found indoor marching and exercises dull.

Gulick gave the class to Naismith. He asked for a new game that could be played indoors in winter. Naismith recalled having about two weeks. The class had eighteen students.

Naismith first tried indoor versions of football, soccer and lacrosse. Each one failed. Players crashed into each other and the walls. The small gym needed a game with less rough contact.

Naismith wanted a goal the ball had to drop into from above. A high goal meant players could not simply slam the ball in. He asked the building superintendent, often named as Pop Stebbins, for two boxes.

There were no boxes. The superintendent brought two peach baskets instead. Naismith nailed them to the balcony railing, one at each end. The railing held a running track above the gym floor.

The ball was a soccer ball. No special basketball existed yet. The baskets still had bottoms. After each goal, someone climbed up to take the ball out.

Naismith wrote his rules and had them typed. There were thirteen. He pinned the pages to the gym bulletin board. The class read them before the first game.

The rules said the ball could be thrown or batted, but not carried. They banned shouldering, holding, pushing and tripping. A player who broke those rules twice sat out until the next goal.

On 15 January 1892, the school’s newspaper, The Triangle, printed the rules. Readers at other YMCAs could now copy them. The typed pages still exist and were sold at auction in 2010.

Naismith’s class of eighteen split into two teams of nine. That first game was played in December 1891. Nobody was sure yet how the new rules would work.

Naismith later recalled that only one goal was scored. Many histories name the scorer as William R. Chase. The score was 1–0. The players fouled often, because they were used to football.

The class liked the game. Some students asked to call it Naismith Ball. Naismith said no. A student named Frank Mahan suggested basket ball, and the name stuck. It was written as two words for years.

Today’s basketball rim sits ten feet above the floor. That number did not come from a study or a test. It came from the Springfield gym. The balcony railing happened to be about ten feet up.

Naismith nailed the baskets where he could. The height stayed as the game spread. Later rule books wrote ten feet down as a fixed rule. High school, college and pro games all use it.

The rim height has stayed at ten feet for more than 130 years. Players have grown taller. The court has grown longer in many places. The height from one old railing never changed.

In early gyms, fans often watched from the balcony. The baskets hung right on the balcony railing. Fans could reach out and knock the ball away. Some helped their own team’s shots go in.

Gyms fixed the problem with a backboard. It was a board or screen placed behind the basket. It blocked hands from the balcony. Backboards spread in the mid-1890s.

The board was meant as a shield. But the ball could bounce off it. The backboard soon became part of the goal itself. Later backboards were made of glass, so fans behind them could see.

A closed peach basket held the ball after every goal. Someone had to climb a ladder or use a pole to get it out. Play stopped each time, and the crowd waited.

Makers soon sold iron hoops with cord nets. At first, the nets were closed too. A person pulled a chain to drop the ball out. By the early 1900s, nets were open at the bottom.

With an open net, the ball fell through by itself. Play could restart faster. The net still slowed the ball, so people could see a goal was scored. The idea of a high target at each end never changed.

Students at the Springfield school came from many places. After graduation, they went to lead YMCAs in other cities. Many took Naismith’s game with them.

The printed rules helped. A YMCA director in another city could read the thirteen rules and start a team. The YMCA’s many gyms gave the game ready-made rooms.

The game also traveled abroad. YMCA workers took it to Canada, China, Japan, France and other countries in the 1890s and early 1900s. Within a few years, basketball was a world game.

Colleges picked up the game fast. Amos Alonzo Stagg had been a student-teacher at the Springfield school. In 1892 he moved to the new University of Chicago. Chicago soon had basketball teams.

On 9 February 1895, the Minnesota State School of Agriculture played Hamline College. The Minnesota school won 9–3. Many histories call it the first intercollegiate basketball game.

The game was only three years old. The final score was low because goals were hard to make. College games soon drew crowds and reports in local newspapers.

Naismith’s first rules did not fix the number of players. A class of eighteen played nine against nine. Some early games had even more players crowded on the floor.

Crowded games were rough and slow. By the late 1890s, rule makers settled on five players a side. The rule books of YMCA and college groups printed that number.

Rule books also changed the goals. Open hoops and backboards became part of the printed rules. Each new edition of a rule book kept Naismith’s core ideas and added new ones.

Senda Berenson was born in 1868 in Lithuania. Her family moved to Boston when she was a child. She trained as a physical education teacher. In 1892 she began teaching at Smith College.

Smith College is a women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts. That is only about twenty miles from Springfield. Berenson read about Naismith’s game soon after it appeared. She introduced it to her students in 1892.

In March 1893, Smith students played their first public game between two classes. Men were not allowed to watch. Many people then believed women should not be seen playing hard sports.

Berenson changed Naismith’s rules for her students. She divided the court into three zones. Each player had to stay in her own zone. Players could not grab the ball from another player.

Berenson said she wanted a game with less rough play. Many doctors and teachers then warned that hard sport could harm women. Her rules answered those worries while still letting women play.

Her rules spread to other women’s colleges and schools. They set the pattern for women’s basketball in the United States for decades. The women’s game and the men’s game went on with different rules.

In 1899 a group of women teachers met to set shared rules for women’s basketball. Berenson edited the first official book of women’s rules. It was printed in 1901.

For about seventy years, women’s and men’s basketball used different rule books. Women’s rules limited how far players could move. Many schools had six players a side, split into halves of the court.

In the early 1970s, college women’s rules changed to five players on the full court. The women’s game now used nearly the same court and team size as the men’s.

The IHSA is the Illinois High School Association. It began in 1900 as a group of member schools. It sets rules for school contests so schools across the state can play fairly.

High schools in Illinois began building teams in the 1900s. In 1908 the IHSA held its first boys basketball state tournament. Winners from many schools met to decide one champion.

The IHSA state tournament has been held every year since 1908. It became one of the best-known school events in Illinois. Towns filled gyms to watch their teams.

Basketball needs a heated room with a hard floor. In the early 1900s, many new American high schools added a gymnasium. Taxpayers in each town paid to build and heat it.

The school gym had many jobs. Students took physical education there during the day. At night, the same room held games, dances, concerts and town meetings.

Some gyms added pull-out bleachers along the walls. A few places also played outdoors. But the heated school gym became basketball’s main home in towns across Illinois.

For most of the 1900s, Illinois high school girls had no IHSA basketball state tournament. Many girls played in school clubs and games. But only boys could win an IHSA state title.

In 1972 Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments. It says no person may face discrimination because of sex in school programs that get federal money. School sports are covered.

Schools had to open more teams to girls. In 1977 the IHSA crowned its first girls basketball state champion. That came sixty-nine years after the first boys champion in 1908.

In 1898 Naismith became a teacher and chaplain at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He also earned a medical degree that year. He led physical education there for about forty years.

Naismith was the first basketball coach at Kansas. He coached until 1907. He is the only Kansas coach with a losing record. He cared more about exercise for all students than about winning.

His player Forrest Phog Allen took over later. Allen won many games and is often called the father of basketball coaching. Naismith died in 1939 in Lawrence.

Men’s basketball joined the Olympic Games as a medal sport in Berlin, Germany, in 1936. Teams came from Europe, Asia and the Americas. The games were played outdoors on clay and sand courts.

Naismith, then 74, traveled to Berlin to watch. Supporters in the United States had raised money for his trip. He saw teams from many countries playing the game he had invented.

The final was played in heavy rain. The court turned to mud, and the ball was hard to handle. The United States beat Canada 19–8. Women’s basketball did not join the Olympics until 1976.