Basketball Begins
In Knoxville in 2025, as tens of thousands of orange-clad fans cheer both men’s and women’s games, it’s hard to imagine an era without basketball. But for the first half of the nation’s history, it didn’t exist in any form. Many 19th-century Americans, from General Grant to Emily Dickinson, lived full lives and never heard that there was any such thing. Then it started, more suddenly than other sports.
Basketball was invented very deliberately by a 30-year-old Massachusetts professor and sometime Presbyterian chaplain named James Naismith, in 1891. Prof. Naismith was trying to devise a sport maximizing healthy exercise without the painful hazards of contact sports like football, and tried to promote it via his local Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).
Knoxville, which had a lively YMCA chapter, was early to catch on to Naismith’s invention. Today, the University of Tennessee (UT) is well known for basketball, and it’s fitting that some early references to basketball came from UT’s Hill, even if UT sports historians have traditionally commenced discussions with the first varsity team in 1909. It was up there, in some form, about 15 years before that.
But the gym at the downtown Y saw it first, and the association’s new gymnastics coach became known for pushing the idea. It happened just as Knoxville, then a mainly industrial city, was growing very rapidly, with dozens of factories, mostly staffed by young men, many of them new to town and looking to make connections.
Not just an athletic resort in those days, the YMCA took the C part of their name very seriously. Bible study was part of the association’s curriculum, as was musical performance. One 1890s City Directory identifies it as a “gospel and song service for men only.” (The YMCA’s purpose, as described in an 1855 Knoxville newspaper, was to “check the hellwards march of many of our young men.”) But “physical culture,” especially healthy athletic competition, was a major emphasis. It was mainly for men, but even in those “men only” early days, the facility hosted a “women’s auxiliary” membership that had their own workouts. (The YWCA was soon to follow.)
In the 1890s, the Y was located within two upper floors of the big double-arched Borches Building, the wholesale-grocery building of brick and stone on Asylum Avenue. It faced Market Square at the northeast corner. Admirers would remember the very day—Oct. 4, 1892—that an agile young physical culture instructor from up north named William H. Gebhardt, freshly graduated from a physical-education school in Chicago, strode into that gymnasium with some new ideas. Even the most history-savvy basketball fans may not recognize that name. But the contemporary record makes it clear that Gebhardt was the guy who introduced basketball to Knoxville.
That October, just 10 months after Naismith’s inaugural game in Massachusetts, the Knoxville Journal & Tribune, the morning daily edited by Union veteran Capt. William Rule, ran two intriguing items about the local Y. Both of them mention “basket ball.” (As was the case with “base ball,” it was some years before familiarity joined the two words into one.)
“Much interest is being awakened in the gymnasium of the association, the young men becoming enthusiastic over the various games being introduced, as hand ball and basket ball,” goes one. On the very next page, a somewhat redundant article, headlined “Is an Attractive Place,” offered a bit more detail:
“The Young Men’s Christian Association gymnasium is becoming a very popular place for young men to congregate evenings…. The classes in the gymnasium are being very largely attended, and when classes are over on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, the boys amuse themselves at hand ball or basket ball, or some other piece of apparatus around the gymnasium.”
The next day, the Semi-Weekly Knoxville Sentinel said a little more, also in an article about the YMCA: “A new game called ‘hand ball’ was introduced last week, and it is expected another game entitled ‘basket ball’ will be introduced this week. The latter game is all the go in other parts of the country at present, but the game must be seen to be appreciated.”
“Mr. Gebhardt has introduced a new game known by the name of ‘BASKET BALL,’ which has proved very popular among the members of the organization,” reported the Sentinel on Nov. 9, 1892, the month the charismatic gymnast arrived. “The game is a modification of foot ball, and is played very much after the manner of the American-Rugby game, with the rough features eliminated. Sides are picked, a rush line formed, the foot ball is tossed into the central space between the sides, and the scrimmage commences. The goals are two wicker baskets suspended at a distance of 10 feet from the floor ground, one at each end of the hall or field on which the game is played. The object is for each side to strive to get the ball into the other side’s basket, and it generally takes clever work to accomplish this.
“The athletic spirit is spreading rapidly in this city, as it has done through the north, and the weakling within the near future will be a thing unknown.”
“Professor” Gebhardt first aroused interest in Knoxville as a gymnastics coach. He was, by all accounts, an impressive and competitive athlete, but also a singer, basso in the Lotus Quartet, and a Bible teacher who conducted “young men’s gospel meetings.” He helped organize the statewide YMCA conference, held in Knoxville in February 1893. The Journal & Tribune described him as “one of the best gymnasts in the South.” This inspiring trainer made the downtown YMCA’s crude gym an exciting place. “The gymnasium, under the direction of trainer Gebhardt, is growing in favor every day and night that passes,” the Sentinel noted that February.
Gebhardt divided his students between boys, young men, “business men,” later adding a fourth category for the deaf, who were just as interested as the rest, mostly in groups averaging about 15 members each. Gebhardt was able “to fashion very fair amateur athletes out of the rawest sort of material.” He was so immediately consequential that newspapers would mention Gebhardt’s name in two or three different contexts on different pages of the same issue: as Bible-study leader, as basso singer, as athletic leader. The Sentinel remarked that he “deserves unlimited praise.”
During that era, Gebhardt also got interested in football, and despite the fact that he had little obvious association with the university, was a member of one of UT’s earliest squads, as left guard. He seems to have become especially close friends with his counterpart at UT’s new YMCA, a university instructor and sometime student. Albert B. Wegener was another Midwesterner of German heritage, a talented artist and writer from Michigan by way of Illinois. Wegener had played as a ball-carrying halfback on UT’s pioneer football team of 1892, judging by early reports, a little more prominently than Gebhardt. Historians have credited the multi-talented Wegener, who was also a catcher on UT’s baseball team, with UT’s first-ever touchdown. (One of their teammates, young engineering Professor Charles Ferris, was on the faculty. The NCAA might frown on those liberties today, but in 1892 it was just a game. In those earliest UT football games, eligibility was a fluid concept.)
For a few months, Gebhardt and Wegener became a duo off the field, giving joint public lectures on “physical culture,” of which basketball was only one exciting new part. They worked together on a big presentation about “physical culture” at Maryville College, and also gave complementary lectures at the big YMCA convention in Knoxville. It would appear very likely that they both played basketball at the Y that fall.
They definitely started something. But it’s not perfectly clear that the basketball-mania of late 1892 lasted. Did anybody play basketball in Knoxville in 1893? It’s hard to find mention of it. One reason is that Gebhardt, the charismatic trainer who introduced it, was offered a job at the Chicago World’s Fair, the biggest party in the world that year.
Both young men left Knoxville to work at the famous Chicago World’s Fair. They were said to have earned “positions” on the staff of the Columbian Exposition, but it’s not obvious what they did at that big fair that drew hundreds of Knoxvillians to the trains. Some prominent Knoxvillians, including Thomas Lanier Williams and Benjamin Rush Strong, had administrative roles at Chicago. There too was Kin Takahashi, the Japanese student who had introduced football to Maryville College. Adelia Lutz (of Historic Westwood, one of Knoxville's Historic House Museums) displayed her art there. Most of them came back when it was over.
Gebhardt said he looked forward to returning to Knoxville, because he said he preferred Tennessee’s climate to Chicago’s. But maybe he never did. He eventually settled in Racine, Wisc., his parents’ home, where he remained involved in YMCA sports, later serving as a basketball “umpire”—but judging by references in newspapers, he never became the “physical culture” sensation he had been for the better part of a year in Knoxville.
However, Wegener did return, to finish his academic career at UT. Apparently thanks to him, “basket ball” experienced a rebirth among many who’d missed it the first time. The sport blossomed again in early 1894, as if it was something altogether new and unfamiliar. Pushing it hardest was Gebhardt’s old friend and colleague, Albert Wegener. The university hardly had an athletic department at the time, but the YMCA, already well-established downtown, built a second building on the tiny hilltop campus in 1891, and it probably served as a sort of a de-facto athletic department itself.
A line in a long column in the March 19, 1894, Journal & Tribune called “University Notes” that included updates on the progress of the military marching band, a meeting of the engineering society, and professors who were out of town, was this aside:
“A new athletic sport has been introduced on the hill, and is called basket ball. Very few have seen the game played, and those who take any interest can see the game played every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. It is played with a foot ball, and two goals are used with baskets on them, whence the name.”
It might be hard to picture a “foot ball” being used for basketball. Naismith’s game was played with an 1890s version of a leather soccer ball, and the laces that kept the air bladder inside could sometimes cause a crazy bounce. But the original game didn’t have dribbling, so perhaps bad bouncing was less of an issue. It was mainly about passing and shooting.
Wegener, behind it all, had been teaching gymnastics, but gave it up when he discovered basketball: “‘Basket ball’ is the latest outdoor sport introduced at the University,” reported the Journal & Tribune. “Instructor Wegener has discontinued his gymnastics class for juniors and seniors and is devoting the time spent in the ‘gym’ to the playing of this interesting and, if properly played, scientific game.”
A few gym rats and a reporter or two had known about basketball since Gebhardt had caused a hubbub with it at the Market Square YMCA, back in the fall of 1892, but the first game that got announced in Knoxville newspapers was on May 22, 1894, when it was one of 15 events at a YMCA Field Day at Lake Ottosee—the then-rural refuge, accessible by electric streetcar, that we now know as Chilhowee Park. No details of that exhibition of the game survive. That day in the park, less than three years after the first basketball game in history, may have been many Knoxvillians’ first glimpse of the game.By the end of the year 1894, “basket-ball” was getting enthusiastic attention in Knoxville.
“Basket-ball heroes are becoming numerous and will soon outnumber those of the football tribe,” predicted the Journal & Tribune. Football was fairly new to Knoxville; UT had fielded its first football team in 1891, sort of, but after a rough start of several losses and not much fan base, football might have seemed like another Gay Nineties fad that was fading.
“Although the game is much freer of the roughness of football, yet accidents will sometimes happen through overzealousness” in basketball, the Journal’s 1894 assessment continued. “The game has many devotees in the gymnasium and is played every night after regular exercise.”
By then, the YMCA gymnasium was in the old Rose Building at 310 Commerce Street, just east of Gay Street along what’s now Summit Hill; that building and address don’t exist anymore, but that spot where many of Knoxville’s first basketball games took place was very near the location of the current headquarters of Visit Knoxville.
The basket was a literal basket—originally, in Naismith’s first games in Massachusetts, a peach basket. By contrast, it sounds as if by 1895 Knoxville’s games were played with specially designed baskets, created by the Biddle Brothers, the saloon-district machine shop best known as an innovative bicycle shop; it’s unknown what those first Knoxville hoops looked like.
In February 1896, Knoxville’s YMCA teams started using a “new official basket ball,” not just a soccer ball. Descriptions are elusive. By then, there were at least two competitive Knoxville teams, the Cherokees and the Invincibles. On April 17, 1896, the Cherokees raised questions about the Invincibles chosen name, by beating them “after a hard-fought struggle of 10 minutes.” The few scores recorded from that era, and the fact that basketball games were always played during the last half-hour of the evening when the gym was open, make it sound as if those early games were always pretty fast and furious.
Wegener graduated from UT in 1896. The Journal & Tribune noted that he “has ability as an artist, and his pen sketches will be missed. Will enter YMCA work immediately and make it his life work.” He was also a writer, publishing a short story called “The New Co-ed” in the university magazine three years after he left UT.
Without basketball’s two most enthusiastic champions, basketball seemed to have trouble getting traction as a regular thing, with organized teams and scheduled seasons.
Basketball did emerge at a dramatic moment in Knoxville's history. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, Knoxville played a role as a training center for soldiers about to be shipped off to fight in Cuba and the Philippines, many of them in barracks at Camp Poland, just northwest of downtown. The Ohio Second Regiment had a basketball team and challenged Knoxville’s Y to a match in September. The home team won, 6-2.
UT’s male students did come up with a team, if not an officially sanctioned one. Because the university itself lacked an actual school gym, its home games were at the university YMCA. It may have seemed a bit humiliating, because UT’s team consistently lost to the local YMCA team. In 1905, when the famous Yale University team challenged a local team to a match, it wasn’t the university they were interested in playing—it was the Knoxville Y. It’s not clear that that game ever took place.
At the same time, it’s hard to pry apart the basketball traditions of the YMCA and those of UT, since UT had its own YMCA, which fielded its own teams. By 1902, there were six competitive YMCA basketball teams in Knoxville, and they repeatedly played each other. Some of them likely included some UT students. According to university histories, UT didn’t have an officially recognized basketball team until the 1908-1909 season.
Meanwhile, basketball caught on with women, whose game evolved alongside the men’s game, albeit with less attention. Both UT and the YMCA were fielding girls’ basketball teams by 1905. (By then, a local chapter of the YWCA had been founded, but lacked its own gymnasium.) Each announced game was a rare novelty. Women didn’t play football, and women’s baseball existed in fits and starts in only a few places in America. Basketball may have been the first team sport enjoyed by women in Knoxville.
One early women’s game in the Knoxville area happened in February, 1905, a match between UT “co-eds” and a younger team representing a brand-new public school called Farragut High, located in what was then considered the countryside, far beyond city limits.
“The co-eds returned to the city last night with drooping colors,” noted the Journal & Tribune, “having been defeated by the country maidens in a well-contested game.” The score was 14-8.
They had a rematch at UT’s YMCA gym. It had an interesting rule. Perhaps because it might seem provocative to watch young women in athletic competition—probably not wearing the long dresses that were still the style of the day—men were not allowed to watch. “Only ladies will be permitted to witness the game,” stated the newspaper. Perhaps for that reason, it wasn’t covered by sports writers, who in those days were all men.
The UT women also played Maryville College that season. Details of that game are elusive, other than the fact that the girls rode the train to Maryville, and spent the night there. Newspaper readers were assured that the UT ladies did have an overnight chaperone, to keep them safe from Maryville’s temptations. The no-male-spectator rule may have been adjusted in years to come. Nobody at the time seems to have considered that what was happening with the round ball was anything of historical interest. Only a few names are even recorded to be remembered or forgotten.
After a few years in Chicago, Albert Wegener took charge of the YMCA in Rochester, NY, in 1900, moving to St. Louis, then Duluth, where he wrote a lively series of articles about the many aspects of physical fitness—culminating his career as the first athletic director of Drew University in Madison, Wisc., a position he held for a quarter-century. It’s a coincidence that both the guys who introduced basketball to Knoxville ended up in Wisconsin, about 100 miles apart. It’s fun to think they might have gotten together occasionally, as middle-aged men, for a little one-on-one, to remember the old days down in Knoxville, when they were very briefly famous.
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Albert Wegener (Duluth News Tribune, Sept. 6, 1909)
University of Tennessee Basketball Team, circa 1890s. (Tennessee Alumnus. Volume 62, Issue 3, 1982, University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections.)
Knoxville YMCA Basketball Team, 1916. (McClung Historical Collection.)
Tennessee Vs. Maryville, circa 1920s. (McClung Historical Collection.)
Central High School basketball players, circa 1925. (McClung Historical Collection.)
