Naismith, James
Basketball
b. Nov. 6, 1861, near Almonte, ONT
d. Nov. 28, 1939
After working as a lumberjack for five years, Naismith went back to high school, graduating when he was twenty-one, and then he earned a degree at McGill University in Montreal, where he played rugby. In 1891, he went to the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, MA, as a student and part-time instructor.
The director of the school, Luther H. Gulick, asked Naismith to develop an indoor sport that would keep students occupied and interested during the winter. Naismith eventually decided that such a sport should have a high, horizontal goal, at which a ball had to be lofted, and he felt that running with the ball would have to be forbidden to avoid dangerous physical contact between players on the hardwood floors of a gymnasium.
He first thought of using boxes as goals, but no suitable boxes were handy, so he used peach baskets. The exact date of the first game is not known, but it wasn't long before Christmas of 1891. There were eighteen student in the class that tried the new sport, so each team had nine players.
Basketball, as it was later named, was an immediate success among the students. Because the school's graduates took it with them as they went to work at YMCAs across the country and in other nations, it spread rapidly. In the early years, Naismith and Gulick worked together to refine the rules, but in 1895 Naismith went to the Denver YMCA, and he had little influence on the sport's development after that.
However, he introduced basketball at the University of Kansas when he went there as a physical education instructor in 1899, and he coached the Kansas team for ten years, winning 53 games while losing 55. One of his students and players was "Phog" Allen, who became the sport's first genuine coach.
In keeping with Gulick's ideas, which became YMCA principles, Naismith favored sport as a pleasurable means of physical improvement and frowned on intense, all-out competition. In his later years, he wasn't fond of what had happened to the sport he'd invented.
Naismith received international recognition in 1936, when basketball became an Olympic sport. He tossed up the ball for the opening tipoff of the first Olympic game and presented the medals to the winning teams.