The Creation of Basketball

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Have you ever wondered who created basketball? What the original rules were? How it has changed since it was first invented? Maybe even if different cultures played it and how they did? I will give you all of the answers in a minute. Did you know that our ancestors played a game sort of like basketball before it was even invented?
Hundreds of years ago in Mexico, people played games where they would use a ball and hoop. They would take turns trying to throw the ball into the basket and keep track of how many each person made it in. Sometimes the adults and the kids would play this game together and sometimes they played separately.
The Aztec Indians also played a game with a ball and a hoop but they actually did competitions. It was called Ollamalitzli. This game was really tough because the hoop was really high off the ground. To win this game you had to make the ball go into the basket. Players who made the shot wore the clothes of all the spectators. The losing team’s captain often got his head chopped off.
Basketball was created by a man named Dr. James Naismith. He created this game not for fun, but because Springfield College’s (then known as the International YMCA Training School) Physical Education class needed a new game to play.
It was the cold winter of 1891 and the head of the Physical Education Department noticed that the students were bored with the usual indoor exercise activities: calisthenics and gymnastics. So he asked Dr. James Naismith to come with a new game the students could play. James tried to adapt sports like rugby, soccer, and lacrosse, to the gymnasium. But each sport became too dangerous when it was played in a small indoor area.
In December 1891, James...

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