In 1891 Luther Gulick, the head of the Young Men’s Christian Association’s physical education department in Springfield Massachusetts had a problem. He needed an indoor winter sport that would be physically strenuous and also require both teamwork and individual effort. He put a young doctor in charge of coming up with such a game. The doctor’s name was James Naismith and the game he came up with has come to be known as basketball. He did this after considerable trial and error in the attempt to modify existing outdoor games like lacrosse to an indoor environment. His idea for basketball was based on a medieval game of marksmanship called “duck on a rock”, and in its original incarnation involved shooting a soccer ball at a peach basket. The basket still had the bottom in place so that the ball would have to be retrieved manually after each goal was scored.
Naismith’s original rules
At the time of its invention basketball was called “basket ball”. The scoring system worked thusly: One point for each basket. The basket was 10 feet above floor level. The original basket ball teams were comprised of 9 men per team and dribbling the ball was not permitted. The teams could, however, use a bounce-pass to move the ball around the court. The very first attempt to play the game using the rules Naismith had invented did not get raving reviews from the players, but it did catch on at the Springfield YMCA after a while. Naismith wrote in his journal that in the initial games players needed constant reminders not to tackle the player with the ball.
The original peach basket had simply been nailed to a balcony, but this changed as spectators began blocking shots by the opposing team. The backboard, which is now standard, was added to prevent this. Another addition that came soon after the game’s birth was the removal of the bottom from the peach basket. This was done as a result of the inconvenience of having to remove the ball from the goal after each score.
Naismith would die in 1939 3 years after visiting the Berlin Olympics in 1936 where he saw the game that he invented become a an official Olympic medal sport.
