It was the winter of The young men had to be there; they were required to participate in indoor activities to burn off the energy that had been building up since their football season ended.
The gymnasium class offered them activities such as marching, calisthenics, and apparatus work, but these were pale substitutes for the more exciting games of football and lacrosse they played in warmer seasons. The instructor of this class was James Naismith, a year-old graduate student. After graduating from Presbyterian College in Montreal with a theology degree, Naismith embraced his love of athletics and headed to Springfield to study physical education—at that time, a relatively new and unknown academic discipline—under Luther Halsey Gulick, superintendent of physical education at the College and today renowned as the father of physical education and recreation in the United States.
As Naismith, a second-year graduate student who had been named to the teaching faculty, looked at his class, his mind flashed to the summer session of , when Gulick introduced a new course in the psychology of play. But now, faced with the end of the fall sports season and students dreading the mandatory and dull required gymnasium work, Naismith had a new motivation.
Two instructors had already tried and failed to devise activities that would interest the young men. So Naismith went to work. His charge was to create a game that was easy to assimilate, yet complex enough to be interesting. It had to be playable indoors or on any kind of ground, and by a large number of players all at once.
It should provide plenty of exercise, yet without the roughness of football, soccer, or rugby since those would threaten bruises and broken bones if played in a confined space. Much time and thought went into this new creation. Duck on a rock used a ball and a goal that could not be rushed. Naismith approached the school janitor, hoping he could find two, inch square boxes to use as goals. The janitor came back with two peach baskets instead.
Naismith then nailed them to the lower rail of the gymnasium balcony, one at each end. The height of that lower balcony rail happened to be ten feet.
A man was stationed at each end of the balcony to pick the ball from the basket and put it back into play. Naismith then drew up the 13 original rules, which described, among other facets, the method of moving the ball and what constituted a foul.
A referee was appointed. The game would be divided into two, minute halves with a five-minute resting period in between. A short time later, the gym class met, and the teams were chosen with three centers, three forwards, and three guards per side. A player could not run with the ball but had to throw it from the spot where it was caught.
Players were not allowed to push, trip or strike their opponents. The first infringement was considered a foul. A second foul would disqualify a player until the next goal was made. But if there was evidence that a player intended to injure an opponent, the player would be disqualified for the whole game.
Umpires served as judges for the game, made note of fouls and had the power to disqualify players. They decided when the ball was in bounds, to which side it belonged, and managed the time. Umpires decided when a goal had been made and kept track of the goals. A goal was made when the ball was thrown or batted from the grounds into the basket and stayed there. If the ball rested on the edges, and the opponent moved the basket, it would count as a goal.
When the ball went out of bounds, it was thrown into the field of play by the person first touching it. The person throwing the ball was allowed five seconds; if he held it longer, the ball would go to the opponent. In case of a dispute, an umpire would throw the ball straight into the field. If any side persisted in delaying the game, the umpire would call a foul on that side.
The length of a game was two minute halves, with five minutes' rest between. The team making the most goals within the allotted time was declared the winner. If a game was tied, it could be continued until another goal was made. The instructors played against the students. Around spectators attended to discover this new sport they had never heard of or seen before. Students attending other schools introduced the game at their own YMCAs. The original rules were printed in a college magazine, which was mailed to YMCAs across the country.
High schools began to introduce the new game, and by , basketball was officially recognized as a permanent winter sport. Naismith was directed by his superintendent to create a game to occupy the students in his class,. Naismith who felt pressured to keep his job thought it was a daunting task so he looked for inspiration from other games at the time such as rugby, soccer, and football to see if he can come up with some mockup of a game.
That game that he created was called basketball. The game was played a lot different back then with 18 players as that was how many students he had in his class. The players were split up into two teams, 9 vs 9 that used a soccer ball to shoot baskets with into a peach basket. There was no dribbling or running with the ball and the courts were much smaller too. The game quickly gained popularity and rules needed to be in place on the YMCA door to the Gymnasium.
In The B. At the height of its popularity in the s, the NBA saw a competitor come into the limelight and a new league was born called the ABA. The America Basketball Asociation looked promising at the time they had a number of high flyers that played above the rim, one player that is a universal name even today is Julius Erving. Dribbling was introduced in While Naismith initially wrote that team sizes could range from 3 to 40 players, depending on the size of the floor space, five-player squads became the norm.
The first basketball team, consisting of nine players and their coach on the steps of the Springfield College Gymnasium in are shown. Naismith is in civilian clothes. The price fetched by the two yellowing pages even eclipsed that of a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln and once owned by Robert Kennedy that was up for bid at the same auction.
Basketball rule books have gained considerable heft since Naismith concocted the first guidelines years ago. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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