YMCA, U.S. Army Spread Development
It was the YMCA that had a major role in spreading basketball throughout the United States and Canada, and throughout the world. In 1893, Mel Rideout arranged the first European match in Paris, in Montmartre. At the same time, Bob Gailey went to Tientsin, China (1894), Duncan Patton to India, Genzabaro Ishikawa to Japan, and C. Hareek to Persia.
The First World War broke out in 1914, and the U.S. Army started fighting in Europe in 1917. During World War I, American Expeditionary Force brought basketball wherever they went. Together with the troops, there were hundreds of physical education teachers, who knew basketball quite well, and even James Naismith spent two years with YMCA in France, in that period. Not only did they bring basketball with them, but even the “modern” basketball, that is the game as it was played in the United States at that time.
Read more about this topic: History Of Basketball
Famous quotes containing the words army, spread and/or development:
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)