YMCA Trivia
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56 free YMCA trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
These YMCA trivia questions cover the whole story of the Y, from the 1844 prayer meeting a young shop worker held for his colleagues to a movement with tens of millions of members on every continent. You will find the four sports that were invented inside YMCA gyms, the first residential camp, the youth movement that grew out of YMCA work, two Nobel Peace Prize winners with Y connections, the wartime recreation centres, the meaning of the red triangle and the year the American organisation adopted its one-letter nickname. The last section is for the song. The 1978 disco hit gets its own run of questions: the album it came from, who wrote it, the record that kept it off the top of the Hot 100, the television night the arm-spelling dance was born, the Guinness record and the ballpark tradition it inspired. Easy questions suit a staff social or a member event at your local Y; the harder ones on dates, founders and foreign names will stretch anyone. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia entries and the organisation's own history, and each question shows its explanation and source after you answer.
30 of 56 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was the Young Men's Christian Association founded?
London
London. Its first members were young workers who had come to the capital for jobs and lodged above the store, and they wanted somewhere to spend an evening other than the street and the tavern.
Q 02Who founded the YMCA with eleven friends?
George Williams
George Williams. A farmer's son from Somerset, he was 22 when he gathered the group, and Queen Victoria knighted him in the association's fiftieth year.
Q 03What did the YMCA's founders first gather for in 1844?
Prayer
Prayer. The founders were young city workers who met to pray and study the Bible as an alternative to the streets after hours, and the gyms the movement is known for came a generation later.
Q 04What was the trade of the YMCA's founder?
Draper
Draper. He worked for a city drapery firm whose assistants put in long days and slept above the shop, and he and eleven fellow drapers wanted a refuge from the streets outside.
Q 05Which sport was invented at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield in 1891?
Basketball
Basketball. A young instructor was given two weeks to invent an indoor game for a restless winter class, and he pinned up 13 rules and split the 18 men into two teams of nine.
Q 06Who invented the game played at the Springfield YMCA in December 1891?
James Naismith
James Naismith, a physical educator who later qualified as a physician, devised the game for a restless winter class; he watched it debut as an Olympic sport at Berlin in 1936.
Q 07What served as the goals in the very first Springfield games of 1891?
Two peach baskets
Two peach baskets were nailed to the gymnasium balcony rail, 10 feet up; their bottoms were closed, so the ball had to be retrieved after every score.
Q 08William G. Morgan invented volleyball in 1895 at the YMCA in which Massachusetts city?
Holyoke
Holyoke: Morgan was physical director of the Holyoke YMCA and wanted a gentler indoor game for older businessmen, played over a raised net.
Q 09What did William G. Morgan originally call his new net game?
Mintonette
Mintonette was Morgan's original name; at an 1896 demonstration, Alfred Halstead suggested 'volley ball' after watching players volley the ball over the raised net.
Q 10Before it spread to Brazil, futsal was created in 1930 at a YMCA in which South American country?
Uruguay
Uruguay. Juan Carlos Ceriani devised it at the Montevideo YMCA so football could be played on indoor courts, in the very year his country hosted and won the first World Cup.
Q 11Joseph Sobek invented which sport on the handball courts of the Greenwich, Connecticut YMCA?
Racquetball
Racquetball. Sobek could not find squash partners at his level and did not care for handball, so he designed a short strung racket for the same court and called his game paddle rackets.
Q 12Which fitness term was coined by Robert J. Roberts, a 19th-century gym instructor at a Massachusetts YMCA?
Bodybuilding
Bodybuilding. Roberts replaced the heavy, risky gymnastics of his day with light dumbbell drills that anyone could follow, the forerunner of today's exercise classes.
Q 13Which youth organization did YMCA boys' work secretary Edgar M. Robinson help launch in 1910?
Boy Scouts of America
Q 21The first YMCA in North America opened in 1851, weeks before any in the United States, in which city?
Montreal
Montreal. Its YMCA opened on 25 November 1851, yet Canadian branches stayed under a joint North American committee until they formed a national council of their own in 1912.
Q 22The first YMCA in the United States opened in December 1851 in which port city?
Boston
Boston. The branch began at the Old South Church, and the evening classes it later ran for working men grew into Northeastern University.
Q 23In 1853 the Reverend Anthony Bowen founded the first YMCA for African Americans in which city?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. Bowen was born enslaved in Maryland and bought his own freedom, and the YMCA on the city's W Street still carries his name.
Boy Scouts of America. Publisher William Boyce had incorporated it but had little time to run it, so Robinson gave it a first headquarters in a New York YMCA office and recruited its national board.
Q 14In 1885 YMCA volunteer Sumner Dudley took seven boys to a lake and began America's oldest continuously running what?
Summer camp
Summer camp. It was not the first American camp, which dates to 1861, but the earlier ones closed; Dudley's week-long outing grew into one that outlasted them, and it took his name after his death.
Q 15Which worldwide organization grew out of a club that Ralph Smedley started at the Santa Ana, California YMCA in 1924?
Toastmasters International
Toastmasters International. Smedley, a YMCA education director, had started speaking clubs at earlier postings that faded when he moved on; the Santa Ana one took hold and still meets as Club No. 1.
Q 16Henry Dunant, a young Swiss YMCA secretary, went on to found which organization?
The Red Cross
The Red Cross. What Dunant saw after the Battle of Solferino in 1859 moved him to call for a relief society for the wounded of any army; four years earlier he had joined the Paris meeting that linked the world's YMCAs.
Q 17World YMCA president J. R. Mott shared which honour in 1946?
Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel Peace Prize. Mott shared it with Emily Greene Balch after decades of knitting student groups together across borders, and in the First World War he steered the YMCA into relief work for soldiers and prisoners of war.
Q 18The Paris Basis motto "That they all may be one" is taken from which Gospel?
John
John: the verse is John 17:21, from Jesus' prayer after the Last Supper, and it appears on the open Bible in the World Alliance emblem adopted in 1881.
Q 19According to Luther Gulick, the YMCA red triangle's three sides stand for which three things?
Mind, body and spirit
Mind, body and spirit. Gulick, who ran physical training at the YMCA's college in Springfield, drew the triangle to stand for the whole person, and in the First World War it became the badge of YMCA work with the troops.
Q 20Which group for travelling salesmen was founded at the Janesville, Wisconsin YMCA in 1899?
Gideons
Gideons. Three men founded it as a fellowship of Christian commercial travellers, and the Bibles its members began leaving in hotel rooms nine years later made the name famous.
Q 24The YMCA Press in Paris printed the Russian edition of which Soviet dissident's history of the prison camps?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The press began by printing Russian books for refugees from the revolution, and its edition of The Gulag Archipelago carried a work that could not be published at home.
Q 25What were the 250 YMCA recreation centres opened for British troops in the first weeks of World War I called?
Huts
Huts. They gave soldiers food and a place to rest in camps and railway stations at home and close behind the front, and thousands of unpaid volunteers staffed them.
Q 26In World War II the YMCA helped found which body serving US troops?
The USO
The USO. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted private groups, not the army, to run off-duty recreation for the forces, so the YMCA and five other charities pooled their work under one name.
Q 27The YMCA grew into a worldwide movement founded on the principles of which Victorian ideal?
Muscular Christianity
Muscular Christianity. The belief that sport builds moral character as well as fitness is why an association of young city workers went on to fill its buildings with gymnasiums and swimming pools.
Q 28Which Victorian social reformer presided over the YMCA through its first decades?
The Earl of Shaftesbury
The Earl of Shaftesbury. He steered through Parliament the laws that took women and children out of the coal mines and, decades later, small boys out of chimneys.
Q 29Which 1851 event helped the YMCA spread beyond Britain?
The Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition. Visitors from abroad met the young association while in town for the fair, and within months YMCAs had opened in North America and across Europe.
Q 30The world YMCA's head office, now in the suburb of Vernier, was based for over a century in which Swiss city?
Geneva
Geneva. The World Alliance was already running its relief for prisoners of war from the city in the First World War; the office has since moved out to Vernier, on Geneva's edge.