Senda Berenson Abbott

Very soon after women began playing basketball, schools throughout the country adopted the game for their women's physical education classes. Each school had developed its own style or modified the game to suit its students. In 1899, the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education (AAAPE) formed the Women's Basketball Rules Committee to create official rules for women players based on Berenson's modifications.

Two years later, in 1901, the rules were first published by sporting goods company A.G. Spalding in the Women's Basketball Guide, which continued to edit and revise until 1917. Berenson's rules for women's basketball remained in use until the 1960s.

Also in 1901, Berenson wrote Line Basket Ball for Women, which provided not only rules for playing the game but Berenson's philosophy about the sport's psychological and physiological effects on women. Not long after, in 1905, Berenson organized the AAAPE's Basketball Committee for Women and chaired the organization until 1917. This committee later became known as the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport.

On June 15, 1911, Senda Berenson married Smith College English professor Herbert Vaughn Abbott. That same year she resigned from the college and spent the next decade as director of physical education at the private Mary A. Burnham School for girls in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1921, she retired and traveled to Europe to study art and music. Her brother, Bernard Berenson, was an authority on Italian Renaissance art. After Herbert Abbott died in 1929, Berenson moved to Santa Barbara, California, where she lived with her sister until her death in 1954.