With the 68^th season of the National Basketball Association (NBA) underway, we thought that we would take a look at the history of basketball, dating all the way back to its humble beginnings in Massachusetts.

There are some people who enjoy the winter, while others find it to be nothing but a nuisance. James Naismith was one of those people who found winter to be nothing more than a hindrance to his athletic endeavors.  He found that the winter kept him from playing outdoors, which resulted in weight gain and loss of strength.

Naismith was born in the Ontario village of Almonte and made the move to Massachusetts to escape those long Ontario winter months. Even though winters are long and cold in Massachusetts, it was a definite improvement from Ontario.

As time progressed, Naismith became a physical education teacher at a small Christian college. Since he knew that winter in New England wasn’t much better than the winter in Ontario, he decided to look for a bright side.  This opportunity arose at the school where he was teaching.  There was an assembly hall with moveable benches and a hardwood floor that would eventually become the birthplace of his invention.

The blueprint for the game that we know today was designed during this time. Naismith created a game that was well-suited to the room’s high ceiling and rectangular floor plan. The original game combined characteristics of soccer, football and baseball, all of which supported and placed an emphasis on teamwork and friendly competition.

So, how were the sports previously listed infused in the original blueprint of the game? For starters, the ball that was used at the time was a regulation soccer ball that, instead of being kicked, was bounced or passed by hand, much like a football or baseball, from one end of the room to the other and was thrown into a peach basket that was hung at either end, thus giving birth to its name: basketball.

Originally, basketball was played with nine members on each team. The idea of the game quickly spread throughout New England and eventually throughout the United States. By 1896, there were enough colleges that had formed their own basketball teams that the first extramural competition was held, but instead of nine players, each team had five.

Two years later, the first professional basketball league was created. Within the next few years, with Naismith’s approval, new rules were implemented to ensure that the game would be played in a friendly-competitive spirit. Among the new rules, the most important were those that defined what a foul or penalty was and gave the person that was fouled the opportunity to take possession of the ball or the chance to throw the ball without opposition. Additional rules included those that would help the speed of the game by incorporating a clock and not basing the game solely on the accumulation of points.

Here is a little fun fact: did you know that when the game of basketball was first played, players could only shoot the ball with two hands? It wasn’t until decades later that the rules allowed for players to shoot the ball with one hand. Could you imagine if this rule hadn’t been instituted and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s classic hook shot never existed? We couldn’t either!

Innovation went hand-in-hand with the invention of the sport. For instance, the addition of nets to the basket allowed for the ball to fall through and be retrieved on the court rather than a referee or player having to climb a ladder in order to retrieve the ball from the wooden basket.

Other innovations included adding a backboard to the basket, which was added to keep fans of the defending team from interfering with the opposing team’s shot or, in 1901, allowing players to bounce the ball once; before that time, players couldn’t dribble the ball at all!

All of these additions and more gradually improved the game in its early stages and slowly became pieces of the puzzle of the sport that we know today. Now, basketball has become popular not only in America, but also around the world, attracting the most talented athletes as well as offering entertainment to fans and competition to players. From its humble beginnings in Massachusetts, the game of basketball that was invented by James Naismith back in 1891 continues to thrive from its inception of using nothing more than a soccer ball and peach basket.

Copyright Davison 2013

Sources:

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2013/04/history-basketball-time-final/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basketball

Media:

http://www.nba.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/1111/james-naismith/content.1.html

http://ionenewsone.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/kareem-abdul-jabbar.jpg

http://www.tucsonhoops.com/resources/history-classroom/basketball-origins

The post A Shot at History: Basketball appeared first on Davison.

But what if we were to tell you that Abner Doubleday did NOT invent baseball, as most of us have been led to believe?  In fact, Doubleday never even claimed to have invented baseball, and his journals and diaries never once mentions the new sport. So who did invent this wonderful game and how did it get to be the phenomenon it has become over the past century? Well, let’s find out.

Though disputed by some sport historians, the game of baseball appears to be based on the English game of rounders, which became popular in the United States in the 18th century, and was often called “townball” or “base.” The first known American reference to baseball appeared in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1791, in which a town ordinance banned playing “baseball” within 80 yards of the Town Hall.  And through the early 1800’s, Americans began playing baseball more and more, on informal teams and using local rules.

But the credit of inventing the game of baseball that was the forerunner of the modern game goes to a man named Alexander Cartwright, who began the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club as a social club for the upper middle classes of New York City. In 1845, Cartwright devised the first rules and regulations that were accepted for the modern game of baseball. Though other clubs existed and were playing by their own rules and making their own versions of the game at the time, it was the Cartwright’s Knickerbockers style (later called the New York style) of the game that became the most popular.

The first recorded baseball game was held in 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. In that game, Cartwright’s Knickerbockers lost to the New York Baseball Club by a score of 23 to 1. As more teams formed in the next decade, more organization followed.  In 1858, the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBL)—the first organized baseball league—was formed. Though it started out as an amateur sport, once club owners began to take in revenue from gate admissions, several clubs began to pay their best players “under the table.” By 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first professional team when the owner openly paid all of his players and the era of professional baseball began.

Once money got involved, things began to change rapidly. In 1876, the National League was formed and began what we know of today as the modern major leagues. For instance, the National League was organized as a group of baseball teams, not players (as was done previously ), and the League imposed new rules on schedules, gambling, and player contracts. While several new leagues tried without success to emulate the National League over the next two decades, only the Western League caught on and thrived; changing its name to the American League in 1901.

By 1902, baseball as we know it was born. The two leagues signed an agreement that really established their dominance over the other independent leagues, and essentially gave them a monopoly on professional baseball. They also established the World Series, with the Boston Americans defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates for the first World title in 1903. So while baseball has gone though many changes in style of play over the past hundred years, the game itself has remained essentially the same from those early beginnings. Now that we know who invented baseball, about the only question left is, who invented Crackerjacks?

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_baseball_in_the_United_States
http://baseball.isport.com/baseball-history/
http://inventors.about.com/od/bstartinventions/a/Baseball.htm

Photo Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1896_Baltimore_Orioles.jpg

Photo from:  http://www.19cbaseball.com/images/early-baseball-history-print.jpg

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