Today in History—December 21: The Birth of Basketball

It was a stormy day in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the students at the International Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Training School were restless. It was too cold to play football or lacrosse outside, and gym teacher James Naismith didn’t dare attempt those sports indoors. He needed something safer—and less boring than the usual calisthenics drills.

Inspired by childhood memories of tossing rocks into a target, Naismith cobbled together an activity using two empty half-bushel peach baskets (supplied by the school’s enterprising janitor), one soccer ball, and nine players on each team—because he had 18 students in class. He nailed a basket at each end of the gym, on a balcony 10 feet high. The object was simple: get the ball to go into (and stay in) the basket, and do it more often than the other team. Of course, this meant that someone had to be stationed up by the baskets to retrieve the ball after each successful shot.

The first game was chaos. A melee broke out, and before Naismith could break it up, one student got knocked out, another dislocated a shoulder, and several walked away with black eyes. Naismith tried again another day—this time with more rules. These “original 13 rules” were designed to keep players from clobbering each other. Several of these rules, including no traveling with the ball and no physical contact, still define the sport today.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Thus, “basket ball” was born. After that, the game spread quickly. Students carried it to other YMCAs, and the rules appeared in a college magazine. International students took it home, and Smith College introduced the first women’s team the following year.

Refinements were made: Backboards were added, and the peach baskets were replaced with open hoops, so the ball didn’t need to be fished out after every successful shot. In 1894 the game got its own ball. In 1897 crafty students at Yale figured out they could move the ball along by repeatedly bouncing it (instead of just passing)—thus inventing dribbling. (It wouldn’t become an official rule until a decade later.) Also that year, the number of players on the court at one time shrank to five per team.

Basketball became an Olympic sport in 1936, with Naismith tossing the first ball. The sport is now played in more than 200 countries, with more than 600 million players. World Basketball Day is celebrated every December 21, officially recognized by the United Nations in 2023.

And the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame bears the name of the clever teacher who turned cabin fever into a global game.

Famous Birthdays

c. 1118: Thomas Becket—Archbishop of Canterbury

1920: Alicia Alonso—Cuban ballerina

1940: Frank Zappa—American musician

1948: Samuel L. Jackson—American actor