Basketball

Basketball

          A sport so interesting that it carries away a whole country. Basketball, invented in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith, at a cold winter night, was just intended to entertain Dr. Naismith’s students inside the gym, while the weather didn’t allow them to play outside. Little did he realize that now, over 100 years later, millions of people play it, watch it, cheer for it; basketball would be one of the most popular sports worldwide.
          In 1861, Dr. James Naismith was trying to invent a game for his students at the School for Christian Workers in Springfield, Massachusetts, which could be played during the cold New England winters. He combined elements of outdoor games like soccer and lacrosse with the concept of a game he had played in childhood, Duck on a Rock. To win Duck on Rock, players threw stones to hit a target placed on top of a large boulder, so he came up with a game played indoors with a soccer ball and two peach baskets nailed to a balcony railing 10 feet above the floor at either side of the gymnasium that served as goals. It was supposed to be an indoor sport with limited physical contact   and it stayed like this until today.
          This game probably had the best start to spread all over the world, because Dr. Naismith’s students weren’t just regular students, but prospective P.E. teachers, and not only from the United States, but also Canada and Japan. Just two months after the game was invented, teams from different YMCAs met for their first competitive game. The Central YMCA and the Armory Hill YMCA played to 2-2 tie. And it didn’t take long for women to figure out that this was a sport interesting for them too. Senda Bereson Abbott read about the “new“ sport Basketball in the newspaper and introduced it to her fellow students at the Smith College in Northampton. And already by 1894, the spring game between sophomores and freshmen was attended by over 1,000 women, cheering for the players.
          The basic...