1894 - Very Early Vintage Basket Ball Find

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I recently picked up this extremely rare 1894 copyright Official Rules and Score Blanks for the 1895-1896 Basket Ball season. This was in a veteran's old Spanish-American War chest. It was produced just a little over two years after Naismith's invention of the game at the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA. What makes this particularly interesting is that it includes the scoring for three of the earliest recorded games of which one of these teams being the New Britain YMCA team that claimed to be the 1895-1896 World Champions. Keep in mind, the YMCA teams were the strongest teams out there up until around 1896. College teams didn’t even exist until that time.

An interesting side note is that I purchased some glass slides earlier this year that contained images of some of the earliest basket ball teams. One of these was the New Britain team. One of their players was Bert Loomis, whom some credit with being the first ever to dribble a basket ball in a game.

You'll notice five players per team shown in one of the games and seven players per team in another. In the first couple of years most games were 7 on 7 or 9 on 9. Starting in 1895 they started transitioning into mostly 5 on 5 games. Dribbling also started becoming more common as part of the game.

Rob M

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