A Brief History of Basketball and Baseball

Basketball

The history of basketball starts with one doctor in early December of 1891. A Canadian physical education instructor and student at UMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, what is Springfield College today, wanted to invent a game that could be played indoors, due to the New England winters, and would be vigorous enough to keep the students both occupied and at a proper level of fitness.

The game began when Dr. James Naismith nailed a peach basket onto a 10 foot elevated track inside a gymnasium. A soccer ball was used for the ball of choice and because the because the basket still retained its bottom the ball had to be poked out with a long dowel every time someone scored.

It was discovered that Dr. Naismith incorporated rules from the Canadian children's game "Duck on a Rock." The rules were simple if you got the ball in the basket your team would get a point, at the end of class the team with the most points would be the winning team. Dr. Naismith appropriately named the game "Basket Ball"

Though the ball used in basketball was originally a soccer ball, the first balls that were made specifically for basketball were brown. The color orange was introduced in the late 1950s to make the ball more visibleto both the players and the spectators.

The first official basketball game wasn't held until the next month, January of 1892. It was played at the YMCA gymnasium with nine players. The court was half the size of the National Basketball Association, the NBA, court. From that point on the game became well established in high schools in the USA and Canada.

Baseball

Unfortunately little is known about the origin of the game baseball. There have been several references to "baseball" or "bat-and-ball" in both English and American documents of the early eighteenth century. Among them are such books as Jane Austens's novel Northanger Abbey, that was written between the years 1798 and 1893 and published in 1818. In the book Austin makes reference to children playing base-ball on a village green.