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Doctor Naismith brought the game to his physical education class.

gymnasium in Topeka.įacilities for developing the game were inadequate in Kansas colleges of this period and the university was no exception. The Washburn Weekly Review announced on November 3, 1898, that 'we may expect our young ladies to issue a challenge to some of the neighboring schools for a basketball game before long,' and reported a week later that they were learning the fine points of the new pastime at the Y.W.C.A. Girls pioneered in basketball at Washburn College, Ottawa University and Emporia Normal, as well as at K.U. The women of Baker University first played the game in the spring of 1897, when the contest between the Delta Delta Delta team and one picked from the other girls of the university was a feature of the first spring field day, according to The Baker Orange of May 19. A space was reserved to be used as an athletic field for women and facilities were provided for an open-air basketball court. In 1897 their athletic facilities were enlarged. There is no record of this contest, if it was played, but if the young women carried out their plan it probably was the first basketball game on a Kansas campus. Coeds on Mount Oread experimented with it as early as 1896, the Kansas University Weekly reporting on November 21 that the girls had organized several teams and that the freshman and sophomore girls hoped to play a match game.

This could scarcely have been surprising to its inventor, for girls had begun playing it in the East when it was barely a month old. When Doctor Naismith joined the faculty of the University of Kansas in 1898 basketball was generally regarded in Kansas college circles as a woman's sport.

So began a game which now rivals football and baseball in the affections of the American sports world, and which is popular in hundreds of countries all over the globe. From the 'Y's' it spread to the high schools and colleges. In January, 1892, the rules were printed in the school paper, The Triangle, copies of which were mailed to many parts of the United States. Naismith, an instructor at the school, worked out the rules, members of his class tried the game and liked it, and when they went home for the Christmas vacation some of them introduced it in their local Y.M.C.A.'s. Training School in Springfield, Mass., in the winter of 1891-1892, the result of an effort to find some method of exercise less monotonous than the established types of calisthenics and gymnastic games. NOTE: The numbers in brackets refer to endnotes for this text.īASKETBALL is celebrating its fiftieth birthday. Transcribed by Tod Roberts and Lynn Nelson ĭigitized with permission of the Kansas Historical Society.

Some Notes on College Basketball in Kansas

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