The precedent-setting Penn basketball team of 1896 sported natty red and blue striped jersey, football trousers, red and blue striped stockings. Except for cleated shoes and leather helmets, the outfit, with optional knee pads, elbow guards, hip and shoulder padding was indistinguishable from the football uniform: (upper row) Hillegas, attack; Buckley, defense; Abbott, manager and coach; Barnard, center; (lower row) Marggraff, defense; Stewart, defense; Milligan, captain and attack; DeLoffre, attack; Shrack, center.
Tonight the men's basketball team plays its first game of the 1996-97 season, taking on Towson State at the Palestra, marking the 100th anniversary of University of Pennsylvania men's basketball and its groundbreaking contributions to the game.
While there may be some uncertainty about the 1996-97 starting team as this paper goes to press, there is absolutely no uncertainty about the identity of the members of Penn's very first opening lineup. Penn's starting five on March 20, 1897, were named Milligan, DeLoffre, Hedges, Stewart and Marggraff.
That five of them played was history in the making, for it marked the first official intercollegiate contest with five-man sides, according to Paul J. Zingg, author of Pride of the Palestra -- Ninety Years of Pennsylvania Basketball.
The Penn Quaker five played against the Yale Bulldog five in a variant of the original game. Basketball, invented by Dr. James Naismith in 1892 at the YMCA Training School in Massachusetts, at first allowed for three to 40 players on a team, depending upon available floor space. The new game was described by The New York Times at that time as "a substitute for football without its rough features."
The first intercollegiate basketball was played in 1896, but thanks to that Penn-Yale meeting in New Haven the next year, five men to a side became standard practice.
That meeting was made possible in part because of former Penn Provost Edgar Fahs Smith, whose statue on Smith Walk has temporarily been put in storage during the construction of the IAST building. As chairman of the University Athletic Committee in 1896-1897, Smith supported the organization of the basketball team and approved its request to play Yale in that first season. Quaker basketball is one of his enduring legacies.
As reported in The Pennsylvanian two days later, Yale won that game 32 to 10. "Being, as it was, an entirely new game to Pennsylvania, its introduction was looked upon with some suspicion, and great difficulty was experienced in obtaining good material or suitable conveniences for practice," read an editorial in that day's P. "Very little support was given by the students, but persistence and hard work resulted in the development of a very fair team."
To commemorate the historic face-off of 1986, this year's "very fair" team will play Yale at the Palestra Saturday, Feb. 15, in the Penn Basketball Centennial game, and much hoopla (pun intended) is planned:
Those interested in purchasing season or single-game tickets for Penn men's basketball should call 898-6151 for more information.
And so the centennial year of Penn men's basketball has begun. It's time to beat Towson State. It's time to beat Yale. And it's always time to BEAT PRINCETON!
Return to Compass Features for December 3, 1996