The History of the First Basketball Game Ever Played

Then, one day, Naismith’s boss gives him an assignment. He wants Naismith to create a brand new game that could be played indoors. It has to be competitive to keep the guys occupied and happy, and he only has two weeks to come up with it. If Naismith comes up with something that works it will be shared with the other YMCAs around the country.

Now he has two weeks to figure this out, so the next day he goes into PE class and takes the games that he is familiar with like soccer, rugby, and lacrosse, and tries to make some sort of a combination of those three games. He then has the guys try to play it on an indoor court. The guys did not like it at all. They could not stand the new game.

Every day Naismith is changing the rules here and there as he is experimenting to find something that will work. Let’s move this boundary here, let’s move that boundary there. Let’s have more players, fewer players. Let’s move the goal this way or that way. Well, he just couldn’t come up with anything that worked. It was basically a failure. Nearly two weeks of experimenting resulting in nothing.

He now has just one day left to go before his assignment is due of creating a brand new game. He goes all the way back and just clears the deck. He goes back to square one to create a new game. He did have a few parameters that he has to work with and these were just circumstantial in nature.

He has to have minimal equipment. He cannot create a game that requires things like gloves, helmets, sticks, racquets, or anything like that because they don’t have the budget for it. The new game could not require special shoes or anything like that. So, that is what he is working with as he is trying to come up with a new idea.

So, one of the first things he starts with is the ball itself. He realizes quickly that he is going to need a ball that is larger in size. The ball needs to be handled with bare hands. He noticed that games with a small ball always require equipment to handle that ball. Baseball requires a bat and gloves. Tennis required a racquet. Lacrosse required sticks. He cannot have any of this.

So the larger ball allows for barehanded handling. He also needs to avoid tackling. Remember, they are on an indoor court. He cannot have guys tackling each other on a hard surface like they do for football when you are on grass. You are going to get hurt and you are going to get floor burns. You are going to get injuries. So there cannot be any tackling. But no tackling also means no running with the ball.

If a guy is running with the ball then something or someone has to go stop that guy, and that means tackling. You could catch and ball and then turn and pass it to another teammate. This game has to be passing only. This is how the players are going to move the ball around the court.

The last thing he realizes is that he is going to have to do something with the goals. You cannot have the goals on the ground like a goal for soccer or an end zone for football because it will tempt the players to shove the ball into the goal using brute force. That will tempt the defense to create some sort of a wall in front of the office to stop them from going into the goal

So he thinks to himself, what can I do to get around this problem? And finally, it hits him. What if we move the goals vertically? What if we put the goals up in the air? Well, that was something different. That would require some finesse over force, which is what he was going for. A goal in the air becomes more difficult to defend. You cannot defend a basket that is way up in the air. To an extent, you can defend the shot and try to block it, but once the ball is in the air it was all skill on the part of the shooter.

They do not even call it a shot. They call it a toss. You tossed the ball into the goal. So, now he was excited. Now he is onto something and he cannot wait for the next day’s class to show the men his new idea.