2023100 Years of Basketball in Serbia - Sheetlets

Basketball was invented in 1891 by Springfield College professor James Naismith, and his colleague William Weiland, a professor of folklore and folk sports from Oakland, an emissary of the American Red Cross, while demonstrating American sports games in Europe, brought constructions for basketball baskets and balls to Belgrade in 1923. This event marked the birth of one of the greatest basketball superpowers in the history of the sport. Weiland gave basketball courses to high school students, physical education teachers and members of the Sokol organization, then the largest sports organization. Weiland left, the baskets remained in the Second Men’s Gymnasium, and basketball started to be played more massively and increasingly better. In 1940, 170 male and female players in four age categories took part in the All-Sokol Rally in Borovo, and the first clubs were formed on the eve of the war, as sections of football clubs.