Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, and in the beginning, hoopers used a soccer ball they tossed into peach baskets. In 1894, Naismith enlisted some help to solve that problem for good.
Flashback to years earlier: after a successful professional baseball career, Albert Goodwill Spalding opened the first A.G. Spalding & Brothers sporting goods store in Chicago in 1876. Naismith approached Spalding almost 20 years later about developing the first basketball, and he did, providing the sport with the ball players across the world use today.
Now, you won’t see the original ball that Spalding created on any court today. Technology has surpassed the fewer than 20-ounce leather ball with a 32-inch circumference that required laces to keep it together. But for a long time, this was how basketballs were.
It wasn’t until 1937 that laces disappeared, and in the subsequent years, the circumference shrunk to 30 inches. Four panels changed to eight, and the movement toward the basketball you see when you walk into a gym today was fully underway.
Perhaps one of the most notable changes is color. Before the late 1950s, brown was the color used for the basketball. But Butler head coach Tony Hinkle didn’t like it. He felt it made the ball blend in with the court, adding difficulty for players and spectators to keep track of the rock. Hinkle wanted the sport to move on from brown and select a new color for its ball. He chose orange.
Hinkle connected with Spalding and recommended his innovation. The orange basketball first burst onto the scene in the 1958 NCAA Finals. Kentucky defeated Seattle, 84-72, in Louisville, Kentucky, to win the national championship March 22, 1958, and did so with stylish new ball that everyone in the building could easily see.
Orange was shortly adopted as the standard for the basketball ball, and that is still the case in 2019. The ball has undergone tons of other alternations since, though. The first synthetic leather ball came in 1972, and in 1983, the NBA accepted Spalding’s full-grain leather basketball as its official tool. Then 10 years later, Spalding released its first composite leather ball, and five more years on, the company unveiled the trademarked Oatmeal and Orange ball named the official ball of the WNBA.
We’ve seen even further innovation in the last 20 years, like balls that stay inflated, pump technology, countless designs and more. Surely, this will continue, and one day we will be hooping in the heavens with the perfect basketball. That is, until the next advancement comes along and sets the next standard.
