From missionary teams to ‘church ball’ and AJ Dybantsa — Basketball holds a special place in LDS and BYU history

Enter many meetinghouses of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints across the U.S. and you will find a pew-packed chapel next to a ready-made sports court separated only by an accordion-like folding wall.

That pairing says a lot not only about how the faith views the intertwining of the spiritual and the physical but also about the vaunted place in Latter-day Saint culture held by a particular sport: basketball.

From its conception, basketball was seen as a way to exhibit “muscular Christianity,” build character, learn discipline and practice teamwork — “no place,” its inventor, James Naismith, said, “for the egotist.”

Latter-day Saint leaders and members quickly adopted it, to the point that “church ball” became an integral ingredient in congregational life.

Fast-forward to today’s NBA, where showboating sells tickets, and the college ranks, where money increasingly rules — even at church-owned Brigham Young University, where millions in name, image and likeness cash helped the Cougars land prized recruit AJ Dybantsa.

How did this happen? How did basketball blend into church culture for so many years? And how does the modern game fit with BYU’s religious mission?

In a recent “Mormon Land” podcast, Latter-day Saint historian Matthew Bowman and scholar Wayne LeCheminant, authors of “Game Changers: AJ Dybantsa, BYU, and the Struggle for the Soul of Basketball,” addressed those questions and more.

Here are excerpts — edited for clarity and length — from that episode:

How did basketball become, as you write, the “crown jewel” of church sports?

LeCheminant • It probably goes back to the banning of football at Brigham Young Academy [the precursor to BYU]. So football was, and obviously is, a brutal sport. Karl Maeser, the principal, was horrified by it. … So eventually this gave a big space for basketball to arise. … In fact, Brigham Young Academy’s first basketball team was a female team.

Bowman • The sport, Naismith hoped, would lead to cooperation, to modesty, to self-sacrifice for the good of the many. He designed it to do this. And, of course, many of the rules of basketball today still have roots in the sport Naismith designed. The notion of passing. Naismith actually originally had nine people on a team on the court at the same time, which was far too many. That’s been cut to five. Nonetheless, the idea still is that your team will do best if you pass. … Wards [Latter-day Saint congregations] begin playing it on their own. You begin to see stakes [regional clusters of congregations] putting together tournaments. It also grows organically via BYU and, eventually, through an all-church tournament [which ends in the 1970s]. … The church seizes a real opportunity for institutionalizing these virtues. And you see by the 1920s these directives in church magazines, these descriptions of how to build basketball courts in chapels.

What role did basketball play in missionary work?

Bowman • Largely because it’s such an American sport, even though it’s invented by a Canadian, Americans are really good at it. So when American Mormon missionaries show up in Australia or in Finland or in Argentina, they’re generally pretty good at this sport. … They go to the local YMCA teams and say, “Hey, we’ve got a team of Mormons. We want to play you folks.” And then the Mormons would play, and they would win. And they would start attracting other people who want to play them. … In 1936 Germany, a missionary team scrimmages against the Nazi Germany basketball Olympic team. This is plastered all over church magazines as being kind of this incredible accomplishment of Mormon missionaries. … One reason why basketball as a missionary tool [fades] is that it begins to become evident in a lot of the places where the church is growing most rapidly by the late 20th century — in Africa and Latin America — that basketball just does not have the appeal that it did in the places where it was really booming in the first half of the 20th century.

So-called church ball became known for, shall we say, not the most sportsman-like play. Did you witness that?

LeCheminant • Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, I played sports all throughout my youth and in high school and so forth. And really the only time I was ever scared about being on a field or on a court was when I was at BYU, playing in intramural basketball leagues. Those were brutal. … And as basketball has become more commercialized, it doesn’t seem to instill the virtues that the church leaders were always hoping to instill: self-sacrifice, cooperation, moral growth and setting aside individualism for the sake of the group. Basketball in many ways is about the individual now.

A number of Latter-day Saints aren’t comfortable with the money currently being tossed around at BYU for sports, including lucrative name, image and likeness contracts for players. Can this trend truly fit with the school’s religious mission?

Bowman • There are a lot of questions about that, right? The money is representative, I think, of something else, which is to say: Why do we have sports at this university in the first place? Is it simply to promote wealth? Is it to promote fame? Is it to do all of the things that professional athletics — and college sports in America today are more or less professional athletics — does? All of these things are driven by commercialization. And is that something that BYU should be involved in? Should BYU be involved in the chase of money and fame and glitz and all of those sorts of things? There are some people who just say, flatly, yes. I think The Royal Blue, the NIL collective supporting BYU athletes, would say, yes, this is good for BYU. …Because it’s good for BYU, it’s good for the church. … Bronco Mendenhall, who was a past football coach at BYU, wrote in his book that Henry Eyring, who is currently first counselor in the church’s First Presidency, told him that BYU sports was one of the best missionary tools the church had.

LeCheminant • The short answer is no, right? This commercialization does not fit with the original mission and the purported mission that BYU, from the president of the university all the way down to professors and so forth, is purporting to teach. The idea that somehow we should seek glory as an individual and use the “Lord’s University,” as many BYU alums like to say, as a tool to make a bunch of money seems to be completely at odds with BYU’s mission. On the other hand, some people say commercialization is fine and that the church and its school need to compete in America and in the world. … Nobody chafes at the idea that people can come out of BYU law school and make more money than somebody who majors in English literature and wants to be a poet. Those are commercial decisions that young people are making all the time, and they’re using the university to move their career forward.

Given the state of college and pro basketball, what would James Naismith think today of the sport he invented?

LeCheminant • He likely would admire the beauty and the amazing athleticism. Watching AJ Dybantsa play is a thing of beauty, along with [Indiana Fever star] Caitlin Clark’s uncanny shooting ability and [Golden State Warriors star] Steph Curry launching the ball from half court. … He would dislike the showboating, the egotism, the “I’m going to dominate you” and all the stuff that goes on with almost any sport now.

Bowman • Before he died [in 1939], Naismith had become kind of the cranky old man of basketball, complaining about how it was being played. He officiated later in his career at a basketball game at the University of Kansas, where he was working at the time, and he was incredibly upset because he saw the players playing far rougher than he hoped they would. He was dismayed by how willingly players would accept fouling. … He then, later on, began complaining that the game was becoming professionalized. And he was complaining about the emergence of professional leagues and saying that he did not think people should be playing this game as a career, that it should be played simply for the love of the game and for the moral development that it could bring.

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