Basketball

Basketball

Sources

Origins of the Game. In the fall of 1891 James Naismith, a physical-education instructor at the Young Men’s Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, developed basketball to replace gymnastics and calisthenics routinely practiced during the winter months. After studying the attributes of lacrosse, football, rugby, and soccer, he created a game in which players would bounce and pass a soccer ball from one another and score points by tossing the ball into a suspended goal. The fundamental concept for the game came to him from watching rugby players spend the winter months throwing rugby balls into boxes. Instead of boxes for goals, Naismith used bottomless peach baskets hung at opposite ends of the railing surrounding the YMCA gymnasium, ten feet above the floor. On 21 December 1891 he introduced basketball to his students, who had tired of their instructor’s experimentation with new games that fall. Naismith recalled that “I asked the boys to try it once as a favor to me, and after the ball was first thrown up, there was no need for further coaxing.” Some students wanted to name the new game “Naismith Ball,” but when the inventor demurred, they started calling it “basket ball.”

From the YMCA to the AAU. Basketball quickly spread throughout the YMCAs of the Northeast. The organization used the game as a means to increase membership and promote spiritual growth through athletic competition. Rivalry between the YMCAs became so intense that the organization attempted to regulate the game through the establishment of separate leagues, but the organizations were soon undermined by professionalism, which, according to Luther Halsey Gulick, the director of the YMCA, “resulted in men of lower character going into the game, for men of serious purpose in life do not care to go into that kind of thing.” In 1896 the YMCA turned to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for help in regulating the extramural basketball leagues and curbing the growth of professionalism. The AAU gained control of the sport by exercising editorial control over the official rules of basketball, which had been published by the A. G. Spalding & Brothers Company in 1894. The AAU also established leagues and sanctioned regional and national championships. AAU leagues and championship play first emerged in New York City in 1898, and then spread to other cities across the nation. The first AAU national basketball championship, however, was not held until 1908.

Professional Basketball. Independent professional basketball teams, which resisted the control of the AAU, emerged in the late 1890s, particularly in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After gaining control of amateur basketball in 1896, the AAU attempted to standardize the game by eliminating rough play and requiring teams to pay registration fees. Philadelphia teams, which played a rough style of basketball, objected to paying registration fees and formed a rival organization, the Eastern Amateur Basketball Association (EABA), in 1898, to accomplish the same goals of the AAU without the registration fees. The EABA, however, promoted professionalism, as team managers and players devised various money-making schemes. In 1899 the EABA became the National League of Professional Basketball (NLPB), with the primary function of making sure that owners and players would honor team contracts. Before the establishment of the NLPB, owners would raid teams for the best players, and players would jump teams for better pay. The NLPB folded in 1903 because it could not force managers and players to honor team contracts.

College Basketball. Colleges and universities throughout the Midwest and Northeast quickly embraced basketball as the Minnesota State School of Agriculture and Mining defeated Hamline College, 9–3, in the first intercollegiate game on 9 February 1895. This game, however, was played with nine-man teams, and a month later the first game played between five-man teams resulted in the University of Chicago defeating the University of Iowa YMCA, 15–12. Northeast colleges and universities took the lead in the development of intercollegiate basketball leagues in the 1900s, with the establishment of the Eastern League, composed of Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and Princeton. Basketball

became the chief sport for college women after Senda Berenson, the director of physical training at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, introduced the game to her students in 1892. Berenson and representatives of Radcliffe, Oberlin, and the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics formed the Women’s Basketball Rules Committee, which codified women’s basketball rules and had them published by the A. G. Spalding & Brothers Company in 1899. In the first intercollegiate women’s basketball game, Smith defeated Bryn Mawr, 4–3, in 1901. Berenson, however, emphasized intramural over intercollegiate games because they facilitated greater student participation in physical training and stressed the social and cooperative rather competitive aspects of sports.

Sources

Albert G. Applin II, “From Muscular Christianity to the Market Place: The History of Men’s and Boys’ Basketball in the United States, 1891-1957,” dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1982;

Neil D. Isaacs, All the Moves: A History of College Basketball (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).