Dr. James A. Naismith

Author's Note: This piece was written as a research piece on Dr. James Naismith, the creator of basketball and inventor of the football helmet.

Dr. James A. Naismith

                Have you ever played sports in your life? If you have then you are like millions maybe even billions of people who play sports each day. Every single sport has been developed to become safer, more exciting, etc. But without the original founder of the game, none of these amazing games would be possible. Take basketball for instance; it is played worldwide by hundreds of millions of people, and still it’s growing faster than ever thanks to its founder Dr. James A. Naismith.

Naismith was a teacher/professor at a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA (James Naismith). Naismith’s boss, Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick Jr., asked him to create a game that would be interesting, easy to play in a cold winter gym, and easy to learn. Gulick gave James 14 short days to come up with such a game. Naismith knew in order to create a new game he would need the help of other games to give him ideas. One of his ideas came from the game Duck on a Rock. During a game of Duck on a Rock the goal was to knock a rock off of a larger rock or tree stump (Duck on a Rock). Naismith played this game with his friends when he was a young boy. This game inspired him to think of the “shoot the ball into the hole” aspect of the game.

The first game of basketball was then played in the Springfield YMCA. The final score was an exciting 1-0 (James Naismith). The game immediately started getting more popular, yet Naismith wondered why. He thought that he had only invented a simple activity to occupy students, time, but he had in fact started a revolution and invented a game that many people play and love today.

Dr. Naismith also invented the football helmet. He played center on a football team and the helmet allowed every player to be much safer while not disrupting their level of play at all (Dr. James A Naismith Biography). Without the invention of the football helmet many more people would get hurt playing football.

Overall, anyone could say that Naismith has made as big an impact on sports as anyone in the world has. He invented one sport and made another sport a whole lot safer. Dr. James A. Naismith was a great man and an unbelievable innovator.

Bibliography

"Dr. James A Naismith Biography." Bio. True Story. 29 5 2013 <http://www.biography.com/people/james-a-naismith-9420059>.

"Duck on a Rock." Wikipedia. 28 5 2013 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_on_a_Rock>.

"James Naismith." Hoopedia. 28 5 2013 <http://hoopedia.nba.com/index.php?title=James_Naismith>.