Sports Origins

Basketball

The game of basketball was created in December 1891, when Dr. James Naismith at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts was looking for an indoor activity. He wrote a set of rules and nailed a peach basket 10 feet high above the gym floor. The first official game was played in the YMCA gym in Albany, New York, in 1892. John Kirkland Clark, who attended high school in New York, brought the game with him to Harvard in 1900. Ironically it was at Harvard, a racially restricted, elite institution, where basketball entered the black community.