---
title: "History of sport"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sport"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:25.327189+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Most sports in the United States evolved out of European practices. However, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, water skiing, and snowboarding are North American inventions, some of which have become popular in other countries. However, lacrosse and surfing in particular arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.
During the colonial era, baseball (closely related to English rounders and French la soule, and less clearly connected to cricket) became established in the urban Northeastern United States, with the first rules being codified in the 1840s, while American football was very popular in the south-east, with baseball spreading to the south, and American football spreading to the north after the Civil War. There is documented evidence of baseball in England. An extract from an 18th-century diary containing the oldest known reference to baseball is among the items on display in a new exhibition in London exploring the English origins and cricketing connections of America's national sport.

While baseball was once claimed to have been invented in the U.S. in the mid-19th century, recent findings suggest a sport of the same name may have evolved decades earlier alongside cricket, crossing the Atlantic with English settlers to the American colonies. One notable discovery found in a shed in a village in Surrey, southern England, in 2008 was a handwritten 18th-century diary belonging to a local lawyer, William Bray. "Went to Stoke church this morn.," wrote Bray on Easter Monday in 1755. "After dinner, went to Miss Jeale's to play at base ball with her the 3 Miss Whiteheads, Miss Billinghurst, Miss Molly Flutter, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Ford and H. Parsons. Drank tea and stayed til 8." In the 1870s the game split between the professionals and amateurs; the professional game rapidly gained dominance, and marked a shift in the focus from the player to the club. The rise of baseball also helped squeeze out other sports such as cricket, which had been popular in Philadelphia prior to the rise of baseball.
American football (and gridiron football more generally) also has its origins in the English variants of the game, with the first set of intercollegiate football rules based directly on the rules of the Football Association in London. However, Harvard chose to play a game based on the rules of Rugby football. Walter Camp would then heavily modify this variant in the 1880s, with the modifications also heavily influencing the rules of Canadian football.

=== Around the world ===

== Contemporary era ==

The 21st century has seen a move towards adventure sports as a form of individual escapism, transcending the routines of life. Examples include white water rafting, paragliding, canyoning, base jumping, and orienteering.
Shorter formats have been invented for various sports, such as T20 cricket and 3x3 basketball. The Youth Olympic Games has helped in globalizing some of these formats, such as 3x3 and hockey5s. Urban sports in general have become prioritized to a greater extent for inclusion in the Olympic Games, due to their ability to appeal to youth and generate digital engagement. Traditional non-Western sports, which had been diminished by Western dominance in earlier centuries, have also become newly popularized and standardized.

== Women's sport history ==

Women's competition in sports has been frowned upon by many societies in the past. The English public-school background of organized sport in the 19th and early 20th century led to a paternalism that tended to discourage women's involvement in sports, with, for example, no women officially competing in the 1896 Olympic Games.
The 20th century saw major advances in the participation of women in sports due to a growing women's sports movement in Europe and North America. This led to the initiation of the Women's Olympiad (held three times 1921, 1922 and 1923) and the Women's World Games (held four times (1922, 1926, 1930 and 1934. In 1924 the 1924 Women's Olympiad was held in London. The increase in girls' and women's participation in sport has been partly influenced by the women's rights and feminist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. In the United States, female student participation in sports was significantly boosted by the Title IX Act in 1972, which forbade gender discrimination in all aspects of any educational environment that uses federal financial aid, leading to increased funding and support to develop female athletes.
Pressure from sports funding bodies has also improved gender equality in sports. For example, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the Leander Club (for rowing) in England had both been male-only establishments since their founding in 1787 and 1818, respectively, but both opened their doors to female members at the end of the 20th century at least partially due to the requirements of the United Kingdom Lottery Sports Fund.
The 21st century has seen women's participation in sport at its all-time highest. At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, women competed in 27 sports over 137 events, compared to 28 men's sports in 175 events. Several national women's professional sports leagues have been founded and are in competition, and women's international sporting events such as the FIFA Women's World Cup, Women's Rugby World Cup, and Women's Hockey World Cup continue to grow.

== Stadia through the ages ==

== See also ==

Sport in the United Kingdom § History
Sport in England
History of physical training and fitness
History of sport in Australia
History of sports in Canada
History of sport in the United States
Nationalism and sport
Sociology of sport

== References ==