In fact, a claim to fame of the Auburn Y is that it holds the record for the longest running church basketball league in the nation - 80 continuous years. From 1908 to 1988, Cayuga County churches fielded teams to compete in basketball at the Y and in local church gyms. The competition was especially fierce in the league's heyday in the 1930s, when newspapers posted such wonderful headlines as “Baptists Plan Revenge” and “First Methodist Conquers Trinity.” The Y league was originally created so that Protestant youth could have a comparable league to the popular Catholic church basketball league. Throngs of spectators crowded into the gyms to cheer the players on.

Volleyball

Four years after James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield in 1891, William Morgan, an instructor at the YMCA in nearby Holyoke, Mass., wanted to create a game for older gentlemen which had less physical contact. He borrowed a tennis net, raised it 6 feet, 6 inches above the floor, and invented the game of “Mintonette,” which could be played by a group of any number and involved volleying a large ball over the net. An observer wisely suggested that a better name for the new sport might be “volleyball.” This originally genteel sport bears little resemblance to the lively co-ed games now played at the Auburn Y.

Racquetball