Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

The game of basketball has evolved a great deal throughout the years. Basketball was invented on December 21, 1891. The inventor of the game was a Canadian clergyman, James Naismith (Joseph Morse, 1973). The game of basketball was fashioned from fragments of other games, seeking to eliminate flaws of indoor rugby, soccer and lacrosse. Naismith also borrowed aspects from the children’s game “Duck-on-a-Rock,” in which children tried to knock off a rock from a boulder by tossing smaller rocks from about 20 feet away (Lauren S. Bahr, 1995). There has been no question that basketball was first played in the United States. In fact, the first game was played at the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School, now called Springfield College. (Joseph Morse, 1973) Naismith invented basketball as an alternative to the calisthenics and marching his students practiced to keep fit in the winters (Lauren S. Bahr, 1995). Basketball was a simple game, which consists of a ball and a basket. The very first ball that was used was a soccer ball until 1894 when an actual “basketball” was invented. The basketball was slightly smaller, about 30 inches in diameter (William D.Halsey, 1975). While, the first bask