![]() The initiative is currently in the early stages, with Canada 1st Basketball working now to map out a business plan while also discussing how best to mark this years upcoming 125th anniversary of the court’s first game. “They were kind of like in a basketball temple for themselves,” said McCabe. Their ambitious mission got a boost a few years earlier when they invited a semi-pro basketball team from the region to visit the court. The goal is to one day open a basketball museum or tourist facility, said McCabe. McCabe is part of a group of locals, calling themselves Canada 1st Basketball, who recently struck a deal with the St Croix Vocational Centre to explore options to preserve the site. “It’s little wonder they didn’t go flying out of the window.” “I always picture, you’ve got 10 guys rammed in here, in a little place like this, with heaters going, the boys just roughhousing,” he said. The games played on this court – most of them taking place before Naismith began tinkering with the rules in hopes of cleaning up the sport – likely looked drastically different from those of today. “And then a little light came on.”Ī map of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia from 1890, a few years before the first basketball game. “It was after the fire, when we started tearing this apart and seeing what was damaged and what wasn’t.” They made their way to the upstairs area that they had been using as storage and lifted a blue carpet, and were surprised to find an intact wooden floor underneath. It was only after a fire tore through the building in 2010 – coming within metres of the court – that they realised the building’s link to basketball, said Tony Whittaker of the St Croix Vocational Centre. The local YMCA was replaced by an athletics association in 1899 and the building later cycled through various uses, ranging from a meeting hall to a recruiting centre during the first world war.Īs time went on, the building’s place in sporting history faded from the memories of most, including the vocational society that eventually bought the building and opened a thrift shop on the ground floor. ![]() “Outside of a few coats of paint and maybe a 1940s vintage disco ball, this is original,” said McCabe.ĭarren McCabe (left), a local historian, with Tony Whittaker of the St Croix Vocational Centre. It was not the first basketball game in Canada the honour likely belongs to Montreal or Toronto, said McCabe, with games taking place on courts that have since been destroyed.īut the court in St Stephen – which sits on the upper level of a unassuming downtown building – is remarkably well-preserved. ![]() The town’s first match, on 17 October 1893, was considering notable enough to be reported in the local newspaper, the Saint Croix Courier. ![]() It spread quickly around the world, and Lyman Archibald – one of Naismith’s original players – brought it to St Stephen, where it found a home in a recently built YMCA. “We say this is the oldest basketball court in the world.” Where we are standing right now has huge significance to the sport of basketballīasketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian living in Springfield, Massachusetts. “Where we are standing right now has huge significance to the sport of basketball,” said Darren McCabe, a local historian in St Stephen, population 4,400. And locals are keen to assert its place in history. But some 10 weeks before that game in 1893, a similar scene had played out in the Canadian town of St Stephen, New Brunswick, on 17 October. ![]()
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