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NBA Basketball Betting
Basketball Betting - NBA History - Tips - Winners - Glossary
Basketball History
Basketball's growth spread in the United States and abroad through Young Men's Christian Associations (YMCAs), the armed forces, and colleges. Due to its simple equipment requirements, indoor play, competitiveness, and easily understood rules, basketball gained popularity quickly. In May 1901 several schools, including Yale and Harvard universities and Trinity, Holy Cross, Amherst, and Williams colleges, formed the New England Intercollegiate Basketball League. The development of collegiate basketball leagues and conferences brought organization and scheduling to competition, and formal league play created rivalries. More importantly, collegiate basketball leagues became a critical training ground for officials.
By the early 1900s basketball was played at about 90 colleges—most of them located in the East and Midwest. In 1905 basketball teams from the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin traveled to New York to challenge Eastern League champion Columbia University. Columbia’s “Blue and White Five” defeated both Midwestern basketball teams, and the idea of an intercollegiate championship was born. By 1914 more than 360 colleges offered basketball, and the sport had spread heavily into the Midwestern states.
In 1915 the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States (AAU), the NCAA, and the YMCA formed a committee to standardize basketball rules, and during the next ten years a number of regional conferences were formed. Games between top regional basketball teams were sometimes awarded national champion status by the press, but an official basketball championship tournament was still many years away. Travel and scheduling difficulties and continued regional basketball rule differences slowed the organization of a basketball tournament that could impartially produce a national champion.
The first national basketball collegiate tournament was held in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1937. The teams in this basketball tournament, however, were all from the Midwest. New York, with a large fan base that generated travel funds, was the site of the NIT tournament, which was the first truly national collegiate basketball tournament. The first NIT was held at the end of the 1937-38 season.
The NIT was promoted by members of the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association—a New York City sportswriters’ group. In 1939 a group of coaches from the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC), fearing Eastern bias, organized and sponsored the first NCAA national tournament. In this basketball tournament the University of Oregon defeated Ohio State University. The NCAA took sole control of the organization of its basketball tournament after that first year. For the next decade, the NCAA and NIT tournaments competed to become the universally recognized national championship tournament, with the NCAA eventually winning out.
The NCAA tournament's original format, used for its first 12 years, divided the country into eight districts, each with a regional selection committee sending a team to the eight-team tournament. As the tournament gained importance, the field gradually enlarged to its present size of 64, made up of champions from a number of conferences, in addition to other successful teams.
Professional basketball began in 1896 at a YMCA in Trenton, New Jersey. A dispute between members of the YMCA team and a YMCA official led to the players forming a professional team and playing for money. In 1898 a group of New Jersey newspaper sports editors founded the National Basketball League (NBL). The NBL consisted of six franchises from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Stars of this league included Ed Wachter, who played in about 1,800 professional games, and Barney Sedran, who played on 10 championship teams in 15 years.
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