Orange Ball: Basketball Development The game of basketball created by Naismith in 1891 became an instant success with colleges, high schools and YMCA’s for both men and women. It was a real game with (usually frequent) scoring that could be played consistently indoors– especially in New England where the weather is only conducive to outdoor play a fraction of the year. Within a few years, five players on each team became the standard on the court versus Naismith’s original nine to a side. It was Alonzo Stagg, a disciple of Professor Naismith, who established 10 men on the court consistently in 1906 and it stuck.
Amos Alonzo Stagg, c. 1906
The development of the rubber basketball occurred in Indiana in 1930. This abolished the need to use a soccer ball or worse yet, a football. The leather basketball as we know it today became common in the 1960’s. Standards for the time of the game were put in place with the introduction of game clocks beginning in 1920. The backboard came into being because the balcony backboards led to fan interference. Soon an established backboard standard of four feet from the end line with dimensions of three and one-half feet wide by six feet high prevailed. Beamis of Pittsburgh Geneva College fielded the first men’s hoops collegiate team. Hamline College and the University of Minnesota School of Agriculture played the first collegiate game February 9, 1895–won by Minnesota 9-3. College rivalries soon flourished and the sport was off and running.
In the 1950s, Hinckley of Butler fame established the orange ball to enhance its visibility by players, coaches and fans. The orange basketball has never left the game since being introduced. More recently, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) uses an orange and oatmeal colored ball–akin to the red-white-blue ball of the former American Basketball Association (ABA). The growth of hoops in its formative years was impressive on the collegiate level with 360 teams playing the game by 1914. The game’s popularity led in turn to organizations overseeing hoops and its rules while providing for an even playing field. Nothing like the modern day arms race for players and coaches hadn’t hit college basketball in the early 1900’s. Therefore, these early organizations didn’t require the unending lists of rules monitoring athletes, coaches and boosters that exists today. Early organizations such as the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the National Association of Athletics (NAA), Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) and eventually the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA, which derived from the IAAUS) soon took command of basketball at its collegiate hub. President Theodore Roosevelt was a strong proponent of the IAAUS. Federal efforts in this era consisted of encouragement and not regulation. The promulgation of simple rules for play, coaching, sportsmanship, fan conduct and even recruiting began to be formulated by these early athletic organizations. There was not the encyclopedia of coaching, student athlete, institution and booster rules the NCAA has implemented over time–only a simple code of play and sportsmanship.