Basketball has a rich and interesting history, and the game people love today once looked vastly different. For example, dribbling was not always part of the game. Skilled ballhandlers are a big part of the appeal of modern basketball, but dribbling was not always part of the game. In the early days of basketball, players moved the ball by passing it to one another, standing in place and then throwing the ball to another player. Details are fuzzy, but basketball historians now credit players at Yale University in 1901 as the first to dribble in a game.