Where was basketball invented?  And by whom?

Canadian doctor James Naismith created the concept of basketball. He took his inspiration from a childhood game called “duck on a rock.” The game involved attempting to knock a "duck" off the top of a large rock by tossing another rock at it.

Naismith attended McGill University in Montreal. He took a job there serving as their athletic director before moving to Springfield, Massachusetts. There, he taught a class at the YMCA training school.

Through his studies of athletics, Naismith realized that there was no indoor game that was as intense and skill-oriented as football. He wanted to create a team sport that could be played in a relatively small space.

One day, Naismith’s class  went into the gym to practice their daily exercises. The football season was over and the men were bored by being stuck indoors. They had no idea that their teacher had created a game that would become one of the world’s most popular sports.

Naismith had hung fruit baskets at both ends of the gymnasium. He instructed the students to throw a round ball into the baskets, and many of them tried to do so from wherever they were standing. Naismith encouraged them to pass, but the players didn’t understand what he meant. Eventually, they caught on. The game was named “basketball.”

There was only one problem with the sport in the beginning. Basketball equipment was still primitive, and getting the ball out of the basket was extremely tedious. It took years for anyone to realize that cutting a hole in the bottom of the basket would eliminate this problem.