Basket Ball--Carlisle Indians Triumphant

Winters in New England are lengthy and bitter, and the college-age students at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Training School (Springfield College today) in Springfield, Massachusetts in the early 1890s could become somewhat boisterous when weather conditions prohibited their going outside to participate in sports. Concerned not only with the students' unruliness but also with their physical fitness, Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick, the school's head of physical education, challenged his employee, Canadian-born James Naismith, to invent a game that the students could play indoors. Gulick gave him two weeks to come up with something.

Born in 1861 near Almonte, Ontario, Naismith graduated from Montreal's McGill University with a Bachelor of Arts in Physical Education and while there was active in rugby, lacrosse, gymnastics, and football. He subsequently enrolled in McGill's Presbyterian College of Theology while serving his alma mater as an instructor of physical education. Upon graduation with a theological diploma in 1890, he departed for America for study and work at the Springfield YMCA Training School.

A scholar-athlete with an intense interest in philosophy, clean living, and sports physiology, Naismith sought to create for the Christian students a game of skill as well as one that provided exercise free of rough play and could be played in a relatively small indoor space. He remembered his elementary school days when he played a game called "Duck on a Rock," which combined tag with throwing, and involved attempting to knock a "duck" off the top of a large rock by throwing another rock at it. After procrastinating for most of his two week time limit, Naismith invented a game with thirteen rules, hung two peach baskets to an overhead track ten feet high, found a soccer ball, and introduced the sport to the eager students who dubbed it, "basket ball."

YMCA Training Schools introduced Naismith's game to college campuses around America. The first college match was in 1894, when the Chicago YMCA Training School lost to the University of Chicago squad, 19-11. The first intercollegiate competition occurred the next year when the Minnesota State School of Agriculture defeated the "Porkers" of Hamline College, 9-3. As early as 1893, the world-wide YMCA movement was introducing the sport to nations overseas. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, basketball became an official Olympic event when men from twenty-two nations competed. The seventy-four-year-old Naismith crossed the Atlantic to attend the games and watched as the USA beat his native Canada, 19-8, to win the gold medal in a game that was played outdoors on a tennis court in the rain. Women began competing in Olympic basketball in 1976. Today, Naismith's game is played in over two hundred countries around the world.  

The April 1896 issue of The Red Man, the monthly newspaper of the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, ran an article on page two entitled, "Basket Ball." The article noted that basketball "is as exciting and interesting as football," summarized the game's rules (including, as the article's illustration depicts, nine players per team on the court in three separate zones), and reported the story of a basketball contest between the Dickinsonians of Dickinson College and the Indians of the Industrial School. Further, the article opined, "For all around athletic training basketball is of inestimable value." The article is on the following page.

Read the entire article