Netball is a game inspired from basketball and is considered by some to be a feminine version of basketball. In the US, where it was born in 1895, it was known for a long period of time as women’s basketball. The game was invented by Clara Gregory Baer just a few years after James Naismith created the game of basketball in 1891 for his students at the School for Christian Workers.
The reason a different version of the game was created was because the clothes that women wore were too voluminous and constrictive to allow them to dribble the basketball or to run with it. Since such manoeuvres are critical to basketball, another version of the game became imperative if women were to play this sport. Today, netball is popular in many countries across the world like New Zealand, Australia, Sri Lanka, West Indies and the United Kingdom.
When netball originated it didn’t have any clear rules which is why many teams made their own rules to suit their convenience. Since there were no hard and fast rules, netball was even played by five players in each team while others were playing with nine players in each team. The nets were also similar to the initial basketball “peach baskets”. The peach baskets were closed at the bottom end so the balls had to be retrieved by the umpires of the game. Later, these peach baskets were made with holes in the bottom so that the ball could slip back to the floor. These bottomless peach baskets gradually evolved into the basketball “hoop”.
The zoning area in netball was introduced due to a misunderstanding. The creator of netball, Clara Gregory Baer, had asked the creator of basketball, James Naismith, for a copy of the basketball rules. Before giving the copy of basketball rules back to Naismith, Baer made some notations on the rule book in pencil. She was trying to denote areas which should be protected. However, James Naismith misunderstood this as the areas in which the women players could move about and thus was born the “zoning area” in netball. Netball also prohibited dribbling or running with the ball, and such rules were all taken together and published as the "Rules for Women’s Basketball."
In 1901, netball was officially recognized as a sport, and subsequently The Regent Street Polytechnic organized an exhibition match in order to inaugurate their grounds. Today, it has become the world’s first and oldest netball club and is now known as the Poly Netball Club. It was here that the first official game of netball was played in 1907.
The International Federation of Women’s Basketball and Netball was established to standardise the rules of the sport, and this was later known as the International Federation of Netball Associations. In 1963, the very first Netball World Championship was hosted by England, and by 1995 netball was included in the Olympics Games.
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