{"id":7058,"date":"2018-10-13T17:08:17","date_gmt":"2018-10-13T21:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/?p=7058"},"modified":"2018-10-13T17:08:17","modified_gmt":"2018-10-13T21:08:17","slug":"basketball-and-my-family-52-ancestors-41","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/basketball-and-my-family-52-ancestors-41\/","title":{"rendered":"Basketball and My Family – 52 Ancestors, # 41"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was raised in the middle of Indiana until high school, and so I learned about basketball and\u00a0to like it as a sport.\u00a0 Basketball was a big school sport, followed by the students enthusiastically.\u00a0 When Sports came up as the 52 Ancestors theme for this week, I tried to think of who in my family played sports.\u00a0 Both of my parents did play some sports as high school students but they both tended to prefer individual activities rather than team ones.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Here is a brief report of William VanBenschoten Denman\u2019s experience with sports.<\/p>\n

William was born in 1869 in Hasbrouck, New York to Aquila and Mary VanBenschoten Denman, their first child and first son.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is reported that his boarding was paid for with eggs and butter from the farm.\u00a0 After high school he qualified for a teaching certificate and taught for a couple of years locally.\u00a0 In 1893 he enrolled in the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts.\u00a0 Here he was in the Physical Department, training to work as a Physical Director for a YMCA.\u00a0 In this department, the students took the general courses about \u201cman\u2019s nature and relationships\u201d and also courses in physiology of exercise, mechanics of the body, physical examination, massage, gymnastic therapeutics, anthropometry, and photography of athletic work.\u00a0 They also took Practice courses that included Hygienic Gymnastics, Games, and Marching.\u00a0 All students also were required to do some Association Work for the YMCA1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

James Naismith was an Instructor at the School during the time William was a student, and had invented<\/a> the game of basketball there a couple of years prior to William\u2019s entry.\u00a0 In these early days of the sport, the rules and team sizes were changing as modifications were developed and then standardized.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So you couldn’t run with the ball, you couldn’t tackle another player, etc.\u00a0 Basketball became popular on campus and William played.\u00a0 He thus took part in the early modifications of the sport while he was there.\u00a0 He played for the \u201cFarmers\u201d team his senior year and they were the overall winners for the School.<\/p>\n

William also played football as center, and his grandson noted that when he played the \u201cflying wedge\u201d was still legal in intercollegiate games.\u00a0 This play is now banned due to safety reasons, with many serious injuries resulting from its use.\u00a0 The yearbook for 18952<\/a><\/sup>, William\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It reported that \u201cRuggles 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.\u201d I wonder what they got up to?!<\/p>\n

This is the description for William in the yearbook.\u00a0 \"Denman,<\/a>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).\u00a0 \u00a0 As it says, William went on to become Physical Director for the YMCA in Reading, Pennsylvania.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He coached various teams in Connecticut, including a wrestling team at Yale, while he was working for the YMCA.<\/p>\n

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  1. International Young Men\u2019s Christian Association Training School.\u00a0 Springfield, Mass., U.S.A. Ninth Catalogue, 1893-4. Springfield College Digital Collections, https:\/\/cdm16122.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/p15370coll1\/id\/344\/rec\/9, accessed 11 Oct. 2018. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. The Triangle, 1895.\u00a0 Published by the Senior Class of the International Young Men\u2019s Christian Association Training School of Springfield, Massachusetts. Springfield College Digital Collections,\u00a0 https:\/\/cdm16122.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/p16122coll9\/id\/157\/rec\/2, accessed 11 Oct. 2018. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I was raised in the middle of Indiana until high school, and so I learned about basketball and\u00a0to like it as a sport.\u00a0 Basketball was a big school sport, followed by the students enthusiastically.\u00a0 When Sports came up as the …<\/p>\n

    Basketball and My Family – 52 Ancestors, # 41<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[378,18,401,110,402],"class_list":["post-7058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-52-ancestors","tag-denman-family","tag-international-ymca-training-school","tag-neversink-new-york","tag-springfield-ma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7058"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7065,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7058\/revisions\/7065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}