Introduction
The Distance Traversed by Big Ten Basketball Players (1939) is one of Lloyd Messermith’s most cited papers. His co-author was Clum Charles Bucher.
Lloyd was registered at the University of Indiana for his PhD. At the time of the publication of the paper, Clum was a member of staff at the University. (His name does not appear as a member of Lloyd’s doctorate committee.)
Clum was an undergraduate at Indiana University and was awarded letters for basketball in 1926, 1927 and 1928. The Indiana Hoosiers basketball team competed in the Big Ten Conference and at that time the team was coached by Everett Dean. Games were played in the Men’s Gymnasium. This was the first venue to use glass backboards.
At the time of writing their paper, Lloyd and Clum were both 34 years old.
Their data collection for the paper was undertaken with Lloyd’s measuring instrument.
It is difficult to find references to Clum elsewhere. He was at the University in the 1960s.
About the paper
This 1939 paper is a continuation of Lloyd’s work with his electrical pursuit apparatus. The paper is just two pages long and has three references (Messersmith and Corey, 1931; Fay and Messersmith, 1938a; Fay and Messersmith, 1938b) .
The paper uses data from three game tracks: an Indiana guard (William Menke); an Indiana guard (Curly Armstrong); a Minnesota guard (John Kundla).
The data discussion is very short and locates the three player tracks in the context of data collected from secondary school games.
Photo Credits
Clum Bucher 1962 (Indiana University)
The Men’s Gymnasium (
Apparatus for measuring distance travelled by basketball players
