History and documentations of sports trace us back for about 3,000 years ago. The early accounts of sports involved the preparation and trainings either for war or for hunting and these sports or games used spears, stakes, rocks and even play-fighting. It was the Old Greece who introduced the formal sports during its first Olympic Games in 776 BC with games namely wrestling, human and chariot races, disk and javelin throwing, jumping and many more.
We are giving you the famous ball sports and how they started out as leisure for men and are now played by women also.
Baseball
In early 19th century, this games was originally named as “townball”, “base”, or “baseball”.
It was Alexander Cartwright from New York who created the modern baseball field in 1845. He and his New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club team and staff designed the original rules and regulations and were accepted and adapted as official for the modern baseball games. There some modify his versions of the rules of the game but the Knickerbockers style is still famous and most applied until now.
The first baseball game that was documented was in 1846 in Elysian Fields in New Jersey when Knickerbockers lost the game to the New York Baseball Club.
The National Association of Base Ball Players was officially formed as the first organized baseball league in 1858 but the first major National League was born in 1876. The first professional baseball league named as the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was established in 1871. Frederick Winthrop Thayer from Harvard University Baseball Club was awarded with a patent recognition for his baseball catcher’s mask in 1878.
Basketball
James Naismith, a Canadian physical education teacher, received orders from his Head of Physical Education, Dr. Luther Gulick, to design an indoor game to give an “athletic distraction” for an unruly class during that severe winter season. He had only 14 days to do it.
Basketball started with thirteen rules. Originally, basketball players dribbled using a soccer ball up and down a court with indefinite dimensions. Points were made by landing the ball in a peach basket.
It was in 1893, when the hammock-style basket with iron hoops were used and the next decade, was the introduction of open-ended nets that stop the practice of getting the ball manually from the basket every time a goal was made.
James Naismith received the Basketball Hall of Fame recognition in 1959.
Football
The Sports Football name came from the English game rugby and the American football began in 1879 with rules and regulations were established by Walter Camp, a player and a coach at Yale University during his time. Walter Camp was known to be an athletic director, an author, board chairman of the New Haven Clock Company and the director of Peck Brothers Company. He played football and at the same time helped in writing and establishing the rules of the game to differentiate it from rugby and soccer.
William Ellis, a student at the Rugby School in England was known to be Walter Camp’s precursor. It was in 1823 when Ellis became the first player, who picked up the ball in the soccer game and ran with it, has changed the rules of the football game from then on. At the Massosoit Convention in 1876 when there were attempts to document the rules of American football and Walter Camp edited each of the American Football rulebooks until he died in 1925.
The National Football League or NFL was officially organized in 1920.