A Game Born from Necessity

With hundreds of millions of practitioners worldwide, Basketball is one of the top five most popular sports. But it all started at the end of the 19th century as a way to keep players of other outdoor sports active during the cold winter. This is a story of a sport with humble beginnings becoming mainstream.

In the winter of 1891, at Springfield College in Massachusetts, a physical education instructor named James Naismith faced the typical winter problem of that relatively new class. In the summer, students were very enthusiastic about playing games like American Football and Lacrosse; in the winter, they were stuck in the gymnasium with less exciting individual activities like gymnastics.

To develop basketball, Naismith was inspired by multiple sports, including rugby, lacrosse, soccer, and duck on a rock, which involved hitting a rock by throwing a ball and is said to have inspired the basketball hoop. The original hoops were just two peach baskets that the school janitor found, and they required the player to take the ball out after a basket.

While many rules were added and changed since Naismith came up with the original basketball, one still remains, the height of the basket remains the 10 feet (about 3 metres) that just happened to be the height of the lower balcony rail of their gymnasium. It was with that, somehow randomly selected height, that game spread from Springfield College through multiple YMCA’s and then after multiple iterations by others spread to the World Stage where is enjoyed by millions today.

Craving more? Check out the source behind this Brain Snack!