The Invention of Basketball

Basketball was invented by Dr. James Naismith in early December 1891. A Canadian-born physician and minister, Naismith was looking for an active game to keep his students at Springfield College in Massachusetts occupied during the cold New England winters. Naismisth nailed two peach baskets on either end of a gymnasium to a track that was elevated ten feet from the gymnasium floor, and wrote the original rules to basketball. On a suggestion from a student, Naismith named the game "basketball" and it stuck.

While scoring during basketball's infancy was very low, the game was delayed significantly whenever a team did score a basket because the peach baskets that were used did not have the bottoms cut out, and a timeout had to be taken to poke the ball out of the basket. Soon, the baskets used had their bottoms cut out to speed up the game.

After inventing the legendary game of basketball and seeing it spread and grow in popularity, James Naismith became the first basketball coach at the University of Kansas and helped build their program into a powerhouse. Even today, Kansas remains one of the top basketball programs in the country, due in part to its history that can be traced back to the games inventor himself.