Basketball and Women – Its Pioneers in Lithuania

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There is a joke that there are two national sports in Lithuania – basketball and mushroom hunting. The Lithuanian men's basketball team is currently considered one of the strongest in the world. However, few people know that the pioneers of basketball in Lithuania were actually women.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the most popular sport in Lithuania was men's football. Basketball was first played by women in 1919 in search of a sport that trains the whole body. The initiator of the game Elena Kubiliūnaitė-Garbačiauskienė remembers: ‘We chose the court <...>, installed a changing room in a bowling alley, bought a ball and after studying various sports we chose basketball – as an aesthetic, collective sport that fully trains the whole body. <...> We adjusted the clothes and shoes and came to train almost every day.’ The basketball players didn’t play by American rules, but by German ones – with a smaller ball and without a backboard behind the hoop. However, the first official basketball match was played by men in Kaunas in 1922 – between the LPEU (Lithuanian Physical Education Union) and Kaunas teams. Compared to today’s games, the scores were low – the LFLS team won 8:6.

Lithuanian Americans played an important role in popularising basketball in Lithuania. Steponas Darius, known for his flight across the Atlantic, was one of them. He played in the first basketball match in Kaunas (for the LPEU team) and published a basketball textbook Basketbolo Žaidimas ir Lietuvos Sporto Lygos Oficialios Basketbolo Taisyklės (‘The Game of Basketball and the Official Basketball Rules of the Lithuanian Sports League’) in 1922.

Although today Lithuanian basketball players are highly valued all over the world, it was difficult in the beginning. Lithuania played for the first time in an international basketball match on 13 December 1925 and lost to Latvia 41:20. Things had not improved even a decade later – Latvia crushed Lithuania with a score of 123:10 in 1935. The situation changed when Pranas Lubinas, a player on the US team and an Olympic champion, returned to Lithuania in 1936. With his help, Lithuania finally defeated Latvia at the end of the same year. Lithuania was admitted to the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in 1936 as well.

Basketball became a popular sport in Lithuania in the 1930s, when the Lithuanian team unexpectedly won the European Basketball Championship in 1937. Women didn’t stay far behind the men's team either – they won the silver medal at the European Women's Basketball Championship in 1938.

The famous Kaunas Žalgiris club was founded in 1944. It was the champion of the Soviet Union many times. The Kaunas team did especially well in 1985–1987, when Arvydas Sabonis was elected the captain of Žalgiris. This talented player went to the United States in 1989 and successfully continued his basketball career in the NBA. The success of Žalgiris continued even after Lithuania regained its independence – the team won the Euroleague championship in 1999, and in 2005 it was a champion of the newly established Baltic Basketball League.

Still, the victories of the Lithuanian national basketball team are the most significant. Lithuania defeated the United Team, which consisted of athletes from Russia, Latvia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states, at the Barcelona Olympic Games of 1992. This victory was symbolic for Lithuania – during the Soviet occupation, Lithuanian basketball players had to represent the Soviet Union as part of the United Team. After Lithuania regained its independence, they could play for their own country's team and even defeated the team that symbolised the oppression of the Soviet Union.