Basketball is a human competitive team sport. In basketball, the object of the game is to move the ball down a court and throwing it through a 10-foot high hoop, while preventing the opposing team from doing the same. The game was played at a number of levels, including amateur, high school, college, and professionally. The game was one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States of America.

Benny Russell played basketball when he was a teenager, but considered himself to be too slow to properly play the game. Willie Hawkins was known in Harlem to be an expert basketball player. (DS9 novelization: Far Beyond the Stars)

While baseball had mostly died out on Earth by the 2040s, basketball remained popular well into the 22nd century. One of the shuttlebays of the Earth Starfleet vessel Enterprise (NX-01) was designed so that it could be converted into a basketball court. At one point, with the exception of T'Pol, the entire senior staff played a game of basketball in the shuttlebay. (ENT episode: "The Forge")

Stephen Foyle and Gage Pembleton played a game of basketball on the Columbia. (ST - Destiny novel: Gods of Night)

In the Kelvin timeline, James T. Kirk was kicked off the basketball team in his senior year at Riverside Central. (TOS - Starfleet Academy novel: The Gemini Agent) In this same universe, a young Leonard McCoy wanted to be a professional basketball player when he was young. (TOS comic: "IDW Star Trek, Issue 17")

A variation of basketball known as Aztec basketball became popular in the 24th century. (SCE eBook: Enigma Ship)

Elim Garak, a Cardassian, once commented that he considered basketball to be "mindless monotony". (DS9 novel: A Stitch in Time)

External links[]

• Basketball article at Memory Alpha, the wiki for canon Star Trek.
• Basketball article at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.