James Naismith Sports Injury

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James Naismith was born on November 6, 1861 in Ontario, Canada. As a child, he enjoyed playing catch and hide-and-seek, which sparked his interest in Physical Education. He attended McGill University in Quebec, Canada where he played Canadian football, soccer, and gymnastics. He also got a Bachelor’s degree in Physical Education while there and later taught Physical Education and was the Athletic Director there (Kansas Historical Society [KHS], 2016). In 1890, he changed schools and went to YMCA International Training College in Springfield Massachusetts. A year later, he was given an assignment to make an inside game that the students would enjoy playing during the winter. While trying to think of a game based on skill instead of strength, …show more content…

Two peach baskets, which were ten feet high, were used as goals and he created 13 rules. One of the rules was that a player cannot run with the ball in hand. According to Sandomir (2015), James said, “That stopped tackling and slugging. We tried out the game with those rules, and we didn’t have one casualty.” His main goal with basketball was to make it a safe sport that people could play without the high injury risk involved in other sports. Another way Naismith planned to avoid injury was by placing the peach baskets high on the wall because he saw that people could become overly aggressive near the goal in other sports, so putting it higher in the air could decrease that aggression (Sandomir, R. 2015). Many of the rules Naismith came up with were in thought of the players’ health and thought of due to watching people play the …show more content…

It has become a popular sport to teach in Physical Education due to the fact that most schools have basketball hoops in their gyms and balls can be bought relatively cheap. At the elementary level, kids can be taught how to dribble, pass, and basic shooting form and basic rules. At the middle school level, they can be taught the basic skills and more in-depth rules and then move into some offensive and defensive strategy and increase the difficulty of those strategies depending on how well the students are grasping them. At the high school level, they can review the basic skills and some strategy and go over rules and then get into playing at a more advanced level. Basketball is a game that can be used by Physical Education instructors at every level because it is a fairly simple game to understand and is low-contact compared to some other sports. Overall, basketball is a great game for Physical Educators to teach and develop

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