Who invented basketball?
Basketball was invented by James Naismith, a Canadian physical education teacher, in December 1891 at a YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Naismith was asked to create an indoor game to keep students active during the cold New England winter. He nailed two peach baskets to the balcony at opposite ends of the gym and wrote 13 basic rules. The first game was played with a soccer ball, and someone had to climb a ladder to retrieve the ball after each basket.
Basketball spread quickly through YMCA programs across the United States and abroad. Open-bottomed nets replaced peach baskets in the early 1900s, and dribbling became part of the game. Basketball became an Olympic sport in 1936 in Berlin, where Naismith attended.
Naismith's legacy
Naismith later became the first basketball coach at the University of Kansas. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield is named after him. Today, basketball is played by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Did You Know?
The first official basketball game ended with a score of 1-0, with the only basket scored from about 7.6 meters away.