A Lithuanian Jewish Immigrant Is the Mother of Women’s Basketball

When you’re watching women’s basketball during the upcoming 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, you can thank a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant for starting it all. Senda Berenson is credited as being the mother of the sport.

Berenson at Smith College

She pioneered women’s basketball as the first physical education director at the all-women’s Smith College in Massachusetts in 1892, a month after men’s basketball was invented. In fact, she modified the original rules of “Basket Ball,” invented by Dr. James Naismith at the International YMCA Training School. She adapted the game for her female classes as a way to exercise—with the goal of socializing and cooperating rather than competing.

Bouncing into Athletics Early

“To insure womanly decorum among her pupils, Berenson forbade snatching the ball, holding it for more than three seconds, or dribbling it more than three times,” sportswriter Sally Jenkins recounted in an article on the history of women’s basketball in 1997. “But for all of Berenson’s antique-sounding notions, she was actually a progressive woman for her time.”

Early on, players were required to wear their hair in braids or ribbons to maintain a tidy look. Senda believed basketball helped women develop not only physically, but also intellectually and emotionally through decision-making and following rules.

The new game soon swept the U.S., and by 1895 had spawned hundreds of women’s basketball teams.

Senda authored the first rulebook for women’s college basketball in 1899 and continued to edit “Spalding’s Official Basket Ball Guide for Women” for 18 years. The rules stayed in use largely untouched until the 1960s.

Sports History’s Unlikely Athlete

An unlikely athlete, she was frail as a child. Born Senda Valvrojenski in Vilna, Lithuania, on March 19, 1868, she was seven when her family immigrated to the U.S. Her father settled in Boston, became a peddler and changed their last name to Berenson. He insisted that the family adopt American ways as fast as possible, according to biographer Betty Spears. He wanted them to speak only English and downplay their Judaism.

Senda was the sister of art historian Bernard Berenson. As a delicate young girl, she enjoyed music, literature and art rather than athletics. However, back problems made her give up piano and her training at the Boston Conservatory of Music.

In 1890 Senda enrolled in the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics to improve her strength as well as learn anatomy, physiology and hygiene. She reportedly would lie across three stools at a time for hours to build up her back muscles. Once her back improved, she developed a love for exercise.

That growing passion led Senda to Smith College; someone had referred her there for a physical education job. Unwittingly, she went on to make history.

Smith class of 1902 basketball team

She was the first woman to be enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1985. She was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Netanya in 1987 and into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1999.

The widow of Herbert Vaughan Abbott, an English professor at Smith, Senda died in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1954. Her legacy lives on, with women now playing basketball all over the world, from America to Zimbabwe.