The Basketball Hall of Fame: The Game That Started in a Springfield Gymnasium

Basketball was invented in Springfield, Massachusetts, in December of eighteen ninety-one, by a thirty-year-old Canadian physical education instructor who had been given two weeks to come up with an indoor game.

James Naismith was on the faculty of the International YMCA Training School, the institution that would later become Springfield College, and his supervisor had tasked him with developing something that could keep restless young men active during the long New England winter, between the football and baseball seasons. Naismith had exactly eighteen students and two weeks to figure it out. He wrote down thirteen rules in a single session and nailed two wooden peach baskets to the balcony railings at opposite ends of the gymnasium. The first game was played with a soccer ball. When someone scored, play stopped while someone climbed up to retrieve the ball from the basket.

The YMCA network spread the game with extraordinary speed. Within a year it was being played across the United States and in several other countries. Naismith lived to see basketball become an Olympic sport at the Berlin Games in nineteen thirty-six, where he watched his creation played by athletes from around the world.

The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame was founded in Springfield in nineteen fifty-nine, acknowledging that this city was where it all began. The current building, opened in two thousand two, is a sixty-foot silver dome on the banks of the Connecticut River, containing nearly forty thousand square feet of exhibits. It honors more than four hundred inductees, players, coaches, referees, and contributors who shaped the sport across more than a century.

The Hall sits on Hall of Fame Avenue less than a mile from the spot where Naismith posted those original thirteen rules on the gymnasium wall. The document itself was purchased at auction in two thousand ten for four point three million dollars, the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia ever sold at the time. The document was later donated to the University of Kansas, where it remains on permanent display at the DeBruce Center, not at the Hall of Fame itself.

Naismith's two-week deadline produced a game now played by more than four hundred fifty million people worldwide.