Stamps with the theme Basketball

Basketball is a team sport invented by an American physical education teacher, James Naismith, in Massachusetts in the early 1890s. While thinking of ways to keep students amused during the bad winter months, he came up with the idea of trying to throw a football into a farmer’s peach basket which was fixed 10-feet high above a gymnasium door – he also wrote the basic rules for the game. The first official game was played in the YMCA gymnasium in Albany, New York in January 1892 on a court half the size of a present-day basketball court, which, for international games, is a minimum size of 91.9 feet long and 49.2 feet wide.