History of netball to basketball. Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor working in the United States, who was trying to develop an indoor sport for his students at the YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts. His game was first played in the campus gymnasium on a court roughly half the size of a regulation NBA court today, between two teams of nine players. It was played with a soccer ball that was shot into closed-bottom peach baskets that were nailed to the gymnasium wall. Women teachers became interested in Naismith's game soon afterwards.
The Massachusetts Game from a set of rules drawn up in 1858 by the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players at Dedham. Although it was recognizably a type of baseball, some features of the Massachusetts Game are very different from modern baseball: Two "modern" features of the Massachusetts Game were not present in New York-style rules drawn up the same year by National Association of Base Ball Players. The Massachusetts Game was more wide-open than modern "New York" baseball, with more scoring and, its proponents claimed, more excitement. First base was only 30 feet away from the striker. There was a constant supply