The first Games Course was held at Nääs starting in 1895. Here, old traditional Swedish singing, dancing, and running games met “new” sports such as football and tennis from England, and cross-country running from Germany.
It is said that basketball was played for the first time in Sweden at Nääs! It was American course participants who taught the game in the summer of 1897. From here, it spread across the country. In Games Course number 3 in 1897, three American women participated, including Senda Berenson, who is known in the USA as the “Mother of Women’s Basketball.” Senda was a gymnastics teacher and began with basketball for women in the USA in 1892 when she wanted to test something new and fun for her students.
She wrote the first rules for women’s basketball in the 1890s and is the author of the “Basketball Guide for Women.” She was inducted into the American Basketball Hall of Fame in 1985.
Handball was played at Nääs starting in 1909. It came to Sweden from Germany via Denmark and achieved wide distribution through the course participants at Nääs.
Ola Waldén, who was a games leader at Nääs between 1904 and 1910, included the game in his book “Outdoor Games from Nääs” in 1912. He describes an 11-player game with rules that mostly differ from modern rules. In 1918, Nääs leader Arvid Karlsson helped start the Swedish Games Association, which was developed after a German model, and in 1930 it was reorganized into the Swedish Handball Federation. A distinction was then made between 7-player indoor games and 11-player outdoor games. The game was considered very suitable for women. At Nääs, it was played outdoors—but with 7-player teams and indoor rules. A tournament between the various courses at Nääs began in the mid-1930s.
The large red house at the edge of the forest to the west, opposite the Craft Teacher Seminary, is called the Play House (Lekhuset) and was built in 1905 as a hall for dancing and ball games, among other things.
From 1915, the courses were primarily called “Courses for the Training of Play and Sports Leaders.” Previously, they had been referred to simply as Games Leaders. The increased interest in sports following the 1912 Stockholm Olympics may have contributed to the name change. The courses at Nääs were quickly changed and modified as new impulses arrived.
