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At 5 feet 9 inches and 150 pounds, Len does not imagine himself playing in the N.B.A. or even the N.C.A.A. tournament

Kenny Anderson grew up in LeFrak City, Queens, and had an army of recruiters tracking his skills by the sixth grade. Stephon Marbury, raised with six siblings in Coney Island, became “Starbury” and the subject of a book, “The Last Shot,” by the ninth. Both played for powerhouse city high schools (Archbishop Molloy, Lincoln), went to Georgia Tech on scholarship and left college diploma-less for the N.B.A. and its attendant fame and fortune.

Before widespread school district consolidation, most United States high schools were far smaller than their present day counterparts. During the first decades of the 20th century, basketball quickly became the ideal interscholastic sport due to its modest equipment and personnel requirements. In the days before widespread television coverage of professional and college sports, the popularity of high school basketball was unrivaled in many parts of America. Perhaps the most legendary of high school teams was Indiana's Franklin Wonder Five, which took the nation by storm during the 1920s, dominating Indiana basketball and earning national recognition.

The first official game was played in the YMCA gymnasium on January 20, 1892 with nine players. The game ended at 1-0; the shot was made from 25 feet (7.6 m), on a court just half the size of a present-day Streetball or National Basketball Association (NBA) court. By 1897–1898 teams of five became standard.

After rejecting other ideas as either too rough or poorly suited to walled-in gymnasiums, he wrote the basic rules and nailed a peach basket onto a 10-foot (3.05 m) elevated track. In contrast with modern basketball nets, this peach basket retained its bottom, and balls had to be retrieved manually after each "basket" or point scored; this proved inefficient, however, so a hole was drilled into the bottom of the basket, allowing the balls to be poked out with a long dowel each time.

James Naismith and his wife, Maude, practicing basketball, a game he invented in 1891 as a way to keep rowdy students busy during winter.

James Naismith is known to the world as the inventor of basketball

A minister as well as a medical doctor, he quickly realized that taller players had an advantage in basketball and wondered if there was a way to stretch babies to make them grow taller. Naismith actually conducted experiments on a machine he invented