Have you wondered how the Basketball game ‘was born’? In the article you can find all the interesting facts about the very first attempts to creating the game.
In December 1891, Canadian – James Naismith, a physical education teacher at Springfield College, Massachusetts, was trying to create activities for his students in a rainy day. He was looking for active play indoors, which to engage them and maintain their physical form during long winters in New England. The teacher described the basic rules and nailed a peach basket to a height of 10 feet. Unlike today’s basketball baskets, the first basket was not with pierced bottom, and the ball must be removed from it after each point.
At the very beginning, basketball has been played with a soccer ball. The first balls specially designed for basketball were brown. The usual orange ball was introduced in the late 50s by Tony Hinkle, who wanted to make the ball better visible to the players and the audience. Dribbling has become an essential part of the game in the 50s when the produced balls were with proper form. Peach baskets were used until 1906 when they were replaced by metal hoops with panel behind them, and a little later it has become possible to pass the ball through the basket.
The Naismith’s diaries were discovered by his granddaughter in 2006 and showed that he was worried about the game created by him, because he had borrowed some rules of the old children’s game. Naismith had given the name of the game – “Basket Ball”. The first official game was played in the gym of the Springfield College on 20th January 1892 with nine players. It ended with the final score 1:0 with a point, scored by 7,6 m., the field was two times less than today. Five-member teams had become standard in 1897-1898.
The first national championship in the United States was organized in 1937 by the National Association of College basketball. In the next year has been created a national invitational tournament in New York, and in 1939 it has been organized another national championship, called NCAA. Between 1948 and 1951, the University basketball is rocked by scandals, involving betting, in which dozens of players of the top teams were implicated in fixing and adjusting points. Then the national invitational tournament is terminated and only the NCAA championship continued to be held. That was an interesting true story, which now sounds like a fairy tale. Can you imagine a game with just 1 point in it?