Smart Set Athletic Club
From Hoopedia
Smart Set Athletic Club of Brooklyn was an amateur basketball team in the early Twentieth Century. Smart Set was the first team to be designated Colored Basketball World's Champions, in 1908 and 1909. The team so dominated their opponents they were known as the "Grave Diggers."
The basketball team was only one of the sports teams fielded by the Smart Set Athletic Club, which was founded in 1905. The athletic club drew its membership from the wealthy black families that lived in the predominantly white Stuyvesant Heights section of Brooklyn. The basketball team, formed in 1907, is believed to be the first independent all-black basketball team.
The Smart Set team played its home games at the Fourteenth Regiment Armory in Brooklyn.
In 1907 they joined other black clubs to form the Olympian Athletic League (OAL), which included rivals St. Christopher Club and the Alpha Physical Culture Club, both of Harlem. Smart Set won the league championship in the only two years of the league's existence, 1908 and 1909.
The Smart Set Athletic Club also sponsored a women's team, the Spartan Girls, one of the first all-black women's basketball teams.
1908 OAL Championship Team
- Charles Scrotton
- Chester Moore
- Robert Lattimore
- Robert Barnard
- Harry Brown
- Alfred Groves
- George Trice
- George Lattimore (manager)
