Winter 2008 Vol. VI, No. 2

Waterbury Years

In Our History

B-Ball on the Fast Break: An Early History of Basketball at AUB.

“To this healthy demonstration of modern student activity may be traced much of a new phase of manliness of bearing and spirit… To foster this, steps have been taken during the year to improve our athletic and gymnastic equipment in the shape of new tennis courts, a new basket-ball field, and the erection of additional gymnastic apparatus.” —SPC Annual Report to the Board of Trustees, 1901–02

Basketball took its first hesitant steps on Levantine soil on the above mentioned “basket-ball field” at AUB, then called the Syrian Protestant College (SPC). Amazingly, it was only nine years after the first basketball game was played that basketball became a fixture on the SPC campus—half a world away from its humble origins in Springfield, Massachusetts where it was invented in 1891 by then student-teacher James Naismith. By the 1950s, the University was considered a “reservoir of young talent” for the Lebanese National Basketball Team. By 1952 most of the players for Lebanon’s first national basketball team, established for the Olympic Games in Helsinki, were AUB students and alumni.

Although the event is not documented in either the AUB or the YMCA archives, and most histories of the sport in Lebanon place the date of arrival in the early 1900s, basketball was probably first introduced to the Levant in 1898 by the first “physical director” at SPC, Lieutenant Volmer Krohn. The lieutenant marked his arrival with a number of additions to SPC’s Physical Education Program such as mandatory “physical drills” and, very likely, basketball. Basketball had recently begun to spread overseas (Parisians played the first game in Europe in 1895), and by 1901, the sport was well enough established that the above mentioned “basketball field” was put in place. The arrival of Lieutenant Krohn between these two events makes 1898 a likely date for the introduction of what must have been a very rudimentary form of basketball—most likely consisting, literally, of just a basket and a ball.

By 1911 there were nine basketball teams playing on campus, second in participation only to soccer. At the annual Field Day—SPC’s highly anticipated sports extravaganza, which drew an amazing 5,000 spectators— the basketball championship opened the festivities while the soccer championship closed them.

After World War I, a comprehensive athletic strategy, based on the “sports-for-all” philosophy, accompanied the transformation of the Syrian Protestant College into the American University of Beirut: “Football, Basket Ball, and Hockey Leagues have been started with eleven teams in each league. The Athletic Committee voted to have so many teams in order that the largest number of men possible might be given the opportunity of getting out and playing. It is, of course, rather disappointing to those interested in seeing only the best teams play but when the departmental and varsity teams are picked the best players will have a chance to show what they can do.” (Al-Kulliyeh, January 1920.) Under this new regime, basketball flourished.

“Showing what they could do,” the AUB varsity basketball began traveling to Palestine and Egypt, where it played teams from other missionary schools like the American University in Cairo (AUC). Later, when the AUC team traveled to Beirut and beat AUB on its home court, an AUB supporter trying to atone for the unexpected loss declared: “Basketball is the chief sport at AUC and their team had been playing regularly [while] AUB had not had a game since the Egyptian trip north [five months prior].” (Al-Kulliyeh, June 1930).

Basketball soon spread from AUB to other schools and colleges around Lebanon, where it was taken up eagerly. Among these colleges was the Makassed al-Horj College, which defeated AUB 33-11 in the first ever Lebanese College Basketball Championship in 1939. (See the official history of the Lebanese Basketball Federation at flbb.com.) AUB’s defeat at the hands of Makassed was likely due to the extra practice Makassed players got as the founding squad for the now legendary al-Nadi al-Riyadi basketball club.