Hermann Niebuhr (basketball player)

Hermann Niebuhr (born June 14, 1904 in Kronenburg ( today a district of Strasbourg ), † January 29, 1968 in Bad Kreuznach ) was a German teacher and basketball player. Because of his pioneering work in the 1930s, he is often referred to as the "father of German basketball ".

Life

Hermann Niebuhr taught at the German secondary school in Istanbul from 1930 to 1933 . There he got to know the sport of basketball, which was still largely unknown in Germany at the time, at the American Robert College and was enthusiastic about it. After returning to Germany in 1935, Niebuhr founded the first basketball department in a German sports club at VfL Bad Kreuznach. At the same time, basketball developed through foreign students at universities such as Berlin, Breslau, Bonn and at the sports schools of the Army and the Air Force. As a later Gaufachwart, he was involved in advertising for the new sport and wrote the first basketball instruction books and rules (1935–37).

At the Olympic tournament in Berlin in 1936, Niebuhr took part as a non-playing "team leader" of the German national team, which had only recently been registered , and which relied primarily on players from the Army Sports School in Wünsdorf and the Air Force Sports School in Spandau , which, however, lost all three games. Trainer was the first "leader" of the German basketball committee Hugo Murero, founded in 1936 . After the Olympic Games up to the outbreak of the Second World War , basketball experienced its first brief heyday in Germany. In April 1939 around 3400 players were registered in 156 clubs . With his club team VfL Bad Kreuznach Niebuhr took second place in the German championship, which was played for the first time in 1939 .

In the post-war years, Hermann Niebuhr drove forward the resumption of basketball games on a regional level, was involved in the consolidation of the supra-regional organizational structures of his sport and worked on the board of the German Basketball Federation (DBB) as 2nd chairman and long-term referee expectation. As an international advisor, he promoted the return of (West) Germany to the international basketball association FIBA . In 1962 he was made an honorary member of the DBB.

literature

• Hermann Niebuhr: Basketball, the new netball game , Berlin 1935 DNB info
• Hermann Niebuhr: International basketball rules , Schorndorf / Stuttgart 1949 DNB info

Web links

• Basketball history - invention, enthusiasm, dissemination ( memento of October 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (DBB website).
• History of VfL Bad Kreuznach