James Naismith and the Beginnings of Basketball

Basketball is one of the world’s most popular sports, having reached all parts of the globe since its creation in 1891. There are dozens of professional leagues spanning six continents, while the National Basketball Association (NBA) is a multibillion-dollar industry wherein the average team is valued at nearly $2.5 billion. The New York Knicks, at $5.8 billion, are the most valuable of the league’s 30 franchises. However, in the early 1890s, the sport was no more than a fun gym class activity at Springfield College.

Football players at Springfield College, then known as the International YMCA Training School, were required to participate in indoor recreational activities during the winter of 1891-92 under the instruction of James Naismith, who led the school’s gym class. However, the students found programming like apparatus work, marching, and calisthenics to be less enjoyable than warm-weather sports like football and lacrosse.

Naismith, a second-year graduate student recently named to the physical education teaching faculty, was motivated to create an indoor game that would keep the students entertained and engaged. After much consideration, he devised a game that combined elements of popular sports at the time such as lacrosse, soccer, and rugby, as well as a childhood game he played in his native Canada that he called “duck on a rock.”

Naismith intended to use two 18-inch square boxes as goals for the game, but instead settled on a pair of peach baskets given to him by the school janitor. He nailed the baskets to each end of the gymnasium balcony and subsequently created the original 13 rules for the game, dictating how the ball would be moved and what would be considered a foul.

The first-ever basketball game played in Naismith’s class was split into two 15-minute halves and featured nine players per side: three guards, three forwards, and three centers. Nobody had the idea to cut holes in the bottom of the peach baskets, so somebody had to be stationed near the balcony to collect the ball from the basket after each successful shot. The sport quickly reached other YMCAs and expanded to other countries because of Springfield College’s diverse international student body.

Naismith, a standout multi-sport athlete at McGill University in Montreal before arriving at Springfield College, maintained involvement with basketball in subsequent years. After graduating from Colorado University’s Gross Medical School in 1898, he joined the University of Kansas as associate professor of physical culture and chapel director. He founded the school’s men’s basketball program that year and coached the team until 1907.

Following several years of service as chaplain with the Kansas Army National Guard’s First Kansas Infantry and YMCA during the First World War, Naismith returned to the University of Kansas and spent nearly two decades as its campus physician and director of athletics. Basketball was an Olympic sport by the time of his death in 1939.

Coincidentally, the Knicks and the Toronto Huskies played the first-ever NBA game seven years later in Naismith’s home country of Canada. A hall of fame for the sport was created in his honor in 1959. Today, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, is a 40,000-square-foot facility that preserves and celebrates the sport across all levels.

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