Basketball and My Family – 52 Ancestors, # 41

I was raised in the middle of Indiana until high school, and so I learned about basketball and to like it as a sport.  Basketball was a big school sport, followed by the students enthusiastically.  When Sports came up as the 52 Ancestors theme for this week, I tried to think of who in my family played sports.  Both of my parents did play some sports as high school students but they both tended to prefer individual activities rather than team ones.  Then I remembered that a Denman cousin, in writing about each of his direct family members, had written about his grandfather who had a connection to basketball and sports.

I went hunting for the piece he had written, in the Denman Quarterly that he wrote and circulated for awhile, and found what I had remembered.  Here is a brief report of William VanBenschoten Denman’s experience with sports.

William was born in 1869 in Hasbrouck, New York to Aquila and Mary VanBenschoten Denman, their first child and first son.  He was raised on the family farm and was able to attend high school in Ellenville by boarding with a family during the week and walking the ten miles home for the weekend and then back to school.  It is reported that his boarding was paid for with eggs and butter from the farm.  After high school he qualified for a teaching certificate and taught for a couple of years locally.  In 1893 he enrolled in the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts.  Here he was in the Physical Department, training to work as a Physical Director for a YMCA.  In this department, the students took the general courses about “man’s nature and relationships” and also courses in physiology of exercise, mechanics of the body, physical examination, massage, gymnastic therapeutics, anthropometry, and photography of athletic work.  They also took Practice courses that included Hygienic Gymnastics, Games, and Marching.  All students also were required to do some Association Work for the YMCA¹

James Naismith was an Instructor at the School during the time William was a student, and had invented the game of basketball there a couple of years prior to William’s entry.  In these early days of the sport, the rules and team sizes were changing as modifications were developed and then standardized.  The original idea was to develop a sport that didn’t take up too much room to play, would help track athletes stay in shape over the winter, and that was fair for all players and wasn’t too rough.  So you couldn’t run with the ball, you couldn’t tackle another player, etc.  Basketball became popular on campus and William played.  He thus took part in the early modifications of the sport while he was there.  He played for the “Farmers” team his senior year and they were the overall winners for the School.

William also played football as center, and his grandson noted that when he played the “flying wedge” was still legal in intercollegiate games.  This play is now banned due to safety reasons, with many serious injuries resulting from its use.  The yearbook for 1895², William’s senior year, reported that there had been some doubt of whether football would be played that year and so some of the seniors played for other teams.  It reported that “Ruggles and Denman took a very interesting trip to Pittsfield to the county fair, were well cared for at the police station and secured world-wide reputation as football players.” I wonder what they got up to?!

This is the description for William in the yearbook.  There were no individual pictures for the Seniors but there is a group photograph and there are a couple of team pictures which William is in (I think).    As it says, William went on to become Physical Director for the YMCA in Reading, Pennsylvania.  He married Sarah Grant in 1896, and continued his work for the YMCA, first in Pennsylvania, then in Norwich, Connecticut and then in New Haven, Connecticut.  He coached various teams in Connecticut, including a wrestling team at Yale, while he was working for the YMCA.

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