Origins From Basketball
Netball traces its roots to basketball. Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor working in the United States, who was trying to develop an indoor sport for his students at the YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts. His game was first played in the campus gymnasium on a court roughly half the size of a regulation NBA court today, between two teams of nine players. It was played with a soccer ball that was shot into closed-bottom peach baskets that were nailed to the gymnasium wall.
Women teachers became interested in Naismith's game soon afterwards. Senda Berenson, a physical education instructor at nearby Smith College, read an article on Naismith's game, and in 1892 adapted his game for her female students. Berenson devised rules that maintained feminine decorum and slowed down potentially "strenuous" play. She divided the playing court into thirds, each containing three players per team that could not leave their assigned zone. Players also could not hold the ball for more than three seconds, dribble it more than three times, or snatch the ball from another player. The first game of women's basketball was played in 1892 at Smith College. By 1895, women's basketball had spread across the United States, with variations of the rules emerging in different areas.
Published rules for women's basketball first appeared in 1895, written by Clara Gregory Baer, who was working as a physical education instructor at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans during the 1890s. Baer introduced women's basketball to her female students at Sophie Newcomb College as early as 1893. According to the IFNA, Baer received a copy of the basketball rules from Naismith, but she misinterpreted his unclear drawings marking the zones that players could best control, believing that they were restrictions on player movement. Naismith noted that Baer's game was substantially different from his version and recommended that she give her sport a different name. In 1895, Baer published the rules of her game under the name "basquette"; these were the first published rules for women's basketball. The rules of this game were substantially different from Berenson's, although similarly adapted for women's participation. Each player was assigned a zone on court to which they were confined, and so a game with seven players per team was played on a court with seven zones. She also forbade dribbling of the ball and guarding, introduced alternating offensive/defensive roles after each goal was scored, and developed rules to maintain elegant posture among players.
Eventually, the first unified rules of women's basketball were published in the Spalding Athletic Library Rules for Women's Basket Ball in 1901, with Berenson as editor and with some rules adopted from Baer's game. Starting from 1918, the rules of women's basketball were gradually rewritten to more closely resemble men's basketball, and today basketball is played under the same rules by men and women. However, a different sport emerged when basketball arrived in England.
Read more about this topic: History Of Netball
Famous quotes containing the words origins and/or basketball:
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“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)