Basketball was invented in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith while teaching at the YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield, MA.

Naismith was instructed to devise a game that could be played inside during the cold winter months that bridged football and baseball. He wanted to devise a game that emphasized skill rather than one that would depend solely on strength. His concept for basketball came from a simple child’s game he had played outside his one-room schoolhouse as a child known as “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.