Long before LeBron James was shooting hoops on the world’s stage, another James was the biggest name in basketball — though folks today may not know it. In 1891, James Naismith was a graduate student and instructor at Massachusetts’ Springfield College when he was tasked with developing a new indoor activity that could be played during the cold New England winters. Needless to say, he nailed the assignment.
An athlete himself — the year prior, he’d played center against Yale in one of the first indoor football games — the Canadian 30-year-old was interested in the burgeoning arena of physical education. He’d already earned a bachelor’s degree in the field from McGill University in Montreal, but enrolled at Springfield (then called the International YMCA Training School) to study under superintendent Luther Halsey Gulick, a pioneer in the discipline.
The first basketball team on the steps of the Springfield College gymnasium in 1891; Dr. Naismith is in civilian clothes and grouped around him are his players.
It was during a psychology of play course that Gulick stressed the need for an engaging indoor sport,” Naismith recounted in his 1941 book, Basketball: Its Origin and Development. This prompted him to recall a comment Gulick had made during a previous discussion, about all new things being reconfigurations of existing ones. When Naismith remarked that one could apply the same principle to create a novel game, he ended up getting the whole class challenged to do just that.
Around the same time, the college’s fall sports season ended, and a group of students who were now forced to take gym class inside were becoming increasingly restless.
“There was no indoor game that would invoke the enthusiasm of football or baseball,” Naismith wrote, adding that during a faculty meeting about the issue, he’d told Gulick, “The kind of work for this particular class should be of a recreative nature, something that would appeal to their play instincts.” His piping up on the topic was apparently enough to convince the superintendent that Naismith should take on this “class of incorrigibles.”
As they left the meeting and walked down the hall, Gulick turned to him and said: “Naismith, now would be a good time for you to work on that new game that you said could be invented.”
The Springfield College gymnasium where the first basketball game was held; 1900s.
He got to work, first attempting to modify football, next soccer, then lacrosse — the last of which left “faces scarred and hands hacked” due to the sticks flailing about in the small space. Nearly two weeks passed, and Naismith dreaded going back to his mentor and the rest of the faculty and telling them he’d failed. He thought hard, going over the philosophy of sports, considering what made games popular, grasping for how he could invent a new principle that wasn’t already steeped in tradition. And finally, he had a lightbulb moment.
“I can still recall how I snapped my fingers and shouted, ‘I’ve got it!’” Naismith wrote.
He’d concluded that the most interesting game at the time was American rugby, which couldn’t be played indoors. Why couldn’t it be played indoors? Because it involved tackling, which in turn required the space for running. If he got rid of the requirement for players to run, and instead made it off-limits, he’d have a brand new concept.
Using that idea as a launching point, Naismith turned to other sources of inspiration, including his childhood memories of playing a game called “duck on a rock,” which featured a goal that was high enough for a rock to be tossed into rather than thrown. He grabbed a soccer ball and got two peach baskets from the school janitor to use as goals, nailing each to the lower balcony rail on either end of the gym — which happened to be 10 feet high. Then, he devised 13 rules (you can read them in their entirety here), and lo and behold, basketball was born.
The first game in December 1891 was a smash success, and news caught on fast. According to Springfield College, students introduced it to various area YCMAs and the rules were mailed to others throughout the U.S. Soon, high schools and colleges began teaching it to students, while Springfield’s international enrollees got the word out to countries around the world. By 1898, the first professional basketball leagues had been organized.
A few decades later, basketball made its Olympic debut at the 1936 Games, and in 1949, the NBA was formed, cementing the sport’s status in American culture. The rules have changed a bit since Naismith drew them up that Springfield December — as have the uniforms — but the spirit remains ultimately the same.
Naismith went on to earn his medical degree and then served for nearly 40 years as chair of the physical education department at the University of Kansas, where he also coached basketball. Per the Naismith International Basketball Foundation, he is the only coach in the university’s history with a losing record, as “he prioritized personal development and character building over winning.”
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