The First Basketball Game Used Peach Baskets

In the winter of 1891, an instructor at a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA named James Naismith faced a challenge: he needed a new indoor game to keep his students active and out of trouble. The activity had to be less rough than football but more engaging than simple exercises. Armed with a soccer ball and 13 basic rules, Naismith asked the building's janitor for two square boxes to use as goals. The janitor returned not with boxes, but with a pair of old peach baskets, which Naismith promptly nailed to the gymnasium's elevated running track, coincidentally setting the hoop height at the now-standard 10 feet.

The initial games, however, were plagued by a constant interruption that seems absurd today. Because the baskets were solid, play had to halt after every single successful shot. Someone, often with a ladder, had to climb up and manually retrieve the ball from the basket before the game could resume. This cumbersome process severely limited the pace and flow of the new sport.

It’s a testament to how new ideas evolve that it took nearly 15 years for the most obvious solution to be implemented. After years of stopping the game or poking the ball out with a long dowel, the simple, game-changing innovation of cutting the bottoms out of the baskets finally occurred around 1906. This allowed the ball to fall straight through, paving the way for the faster, continuous play that defines modern basketball and leading to the eventual replacement of baskets with open-ended nets.