Abstract
The beginning of basketball in the world dates back to 1891 when a Canadian, James Naismith, invented the game for students in Springfield. After a short time, matches were played in Europe, in Paris (1893) and London (1894). The first demonstrational game in Poland was played by women in 1909, in Lviv. The discipline spread throughout Europe after World War I. In the 1920s, some state and international organizations were established to standardize the rules of the game. They allowed to play the first national championships and afterwards to organize interstate matches. In 1935, the First European Men’s Basketball Championship was organized, and three years later, women made their debut in the competition of this rank. Between 1938 and 2021, there were thirty-eight editions of the championships, in which the Polish national team participated twenty-nine times. Most medals were won by athletes from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Czechoslovakia, France, Bulgaria, and Spain. Poland’s most outstanding achievement was the gold medal won in Katowice in 1999. What is more, Polish women won two silver medals (1980, 1981) and two bronze medals (1938, 1968).