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A Description Of Basketball And Baseball

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A Description of Basketball
During the December lull between seasons of football and baseball, James Naismith, a teacher at the International Young Men’s Christian Association in Springfield Massachusetts, was presented with the task of maintaining the physicality of forty plus students (Cantwell, 2004, 1075). During the 1890’s there was no official sport or popular indoor activity that could help maintain the stamina, health and condition of football, baseball, and track athletes during his or her seasonal break. With the prospect of inventing a solution to this dilemma, Dr. Naismith took on the idea of coming up with a valid up-tempo indoor game to maintain and improve athletes’ levels of fitness during the winter months (Cantwell, 2004, 1075). With his mind and thoughts churning, Naismith pulled from deep down into his memory bank, scratching the surface of his childhood days in Canada farmland and recalled to mind a simple game that he used to play when he was a young man; “Duck on a Rock” (Cantwell, 2004, 1076). Dr. John D. Cantwell explains the rules and basic set up for the modest sport of “Duck on a Rock” in his article “The Physician Who Invented Basketball”. He explains that the players of “Duck on a Rock” are engaged in the task of tossing small pebbles up towards a rock that is the size of a softball placed about twenty feet away from their lobbing station (Cantwell, 2004, 1076). Stemming from this familiar set up and concept, the resourceful and creative Dr.

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