The Origin of Basketball at Smith
News
By Nanci Young, College Archivist
The Smith College class of 1897 basketball team playing in their sophomore year.
Published February 18, 2025
Our Pioneer basketball team has been making history these last few seasons. The excitement in Ainsworth Gym on home game days is palpable. Women’s basketball and Smith have gone hand-in-hand together, ever since 1893, when the Director of Gymnastics, Senda Berenson watched a YMCA basketball game in Springfield, MA and decided that Smith women could play that game just as well.
Berenson brought the game back to Alumnae Gymnasium, chose women from various classes (seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshman) and started them practicing. The energy of the women who participated in these practices was contagious. Lines of students would form at the doors of Alumnae Gymnasium to see a game, and snake around Washburn and Hubbard House.
Josephine Dodge Daskam, Class of 1898, describes the tenor and temperament of a game in her short story “The Emotions of a Sub-Guard” part of her book Smith College Stories (published by Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1900). Check it out for yourself. In the meantime, basketball continues to hold sway over the students during the winter months. While no longer the painfully slow game that it was in the 1890s (the first game ended with a 5-4 win by the sophomores), the energy, creativity, and passion that Berenson and the class teams of 1895 and 1896 generated at that first game on March 22, 1893 still resonates at Smith today.
View more images from the early days of Smith College basketball in Five College Compass.
Waiting for the opening of Alumnae Gym doors for a basketball game, c1895.
Gallery of Photos from College Archives
The New Woman: A New Game
Learn how one educator's decision to incorporate basketball into her curricula revolutionized the world of women's sport and redefined women's societal role at the turn of the 20th century. Experience the exhilaration of student athletes as they participated in the first women's collegiate basketball championship over a century ago.
This film was written and produced by Kate Lee in 2010, and narrated by Merrilyn Lewis.
Contact
Nanci Young, College Archivist
nyoung@smith.edu