James Naismith

Life & Legacy

James Naismith ( NAY-smith; November 6, 1861 – November 28, 1939) was a Canadian-American physical educator, physician, Christian chaplain, and sports coach, best known as the inventor of the game of basketball.
First developing the game in Canada, he wrote the original basketball rule book after moving to the United States and founded the University of Kansas basketball program in 1898. Naismith lived to see basketball adopted as an Olympic demonstration sport in 1904 and as an official event at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, and to see the birth of the National Invitation Tournament (1938) and the NCAA Tournament (1939). He also lived to see the creation of half of the leagues that eventually became the present-day National Basketball Association, with the 1935 creation of the Midwest Basketball Conference before it became the National Basketball League in 1937.
Naismith studied and taught physical education at McGill University in Montreal until 1890, before moving later that year to Springfield, Massachusetts, where in 1891 he designed basketball while teaching at the International YMCA Training School. Seven years after inventing basketball, Naismith received his medical degree in Denver in 1898. He then arrived at the University of Kansas, later becoming the Kansas Jayhawks' athletic director and coach.
While a coach at Kansas, Naismith coached Phog Allen, who later became the coach at Kansas for 39 seasons, beginning a lengthy coaching tree. Allen went on to coach players including Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith, who themselves coached many notable players and future coaches.