Basketball Day

What the day is

Basketball Day is observed on January 20, the date of the first public game in 1892, a few weeks after the sport was invented.

Origin and background

It is one of the few major sports with a known author and a deliberate design brief. James Naismith, a physical education instructor in Springfield, Massachusetts, was told to devise an activity to occupy a class of restless young men through a New England winter, indoors, without the injuries that came with moving football inside. He had about two weeks.

His solution attacked the injury problem directly. A goal placed above the players and facing upward meant scoring could not be done by force, since you cannot run a ball into a horizontal target, and the original rules forbade running with the ball at all. Players had to pass. Dribbling was not in the thirteen rules he posted; it developed later as players found they could bounce the ball to move it, and was then absorbed into the game.

The equipment was whatever was available. He asked for boxes and was given peach baskets, which were nailed to the balcony rail. The bottoms were intact, so every successful shot stopped play while somebody retrieved the ball, at first with a pole and eventually by cutting the base out.

It spread with remarkable speed through the international YMCA network, reaching other countries within a few years, which is why it was played widely long before professional leagues existed. The original typed sheet of thirteen rules survives and sold at auction in 2010 for several million dollars.

How to take part

• Play, even badly. The game was designed for people with no particular athletic background.
• Read the thirteen original rules, which take two minutes and are startlingly short.
• Try a game without dribbling and see what it does to the passing.
• Find a local court. Public outdoor courts are one of the better pieces of civic infrastructure.
• Watch a women's game, which is where a lot of the best passing currently is.