It may look like basketball, but the backboard is missing and the players wear skirts.

An offshoot of basketball extremely popular with women in Britain and Commonwealth countries, netball is fast gaining ground in New York.

There are more than 600 players in the Caribbean American Netball Association, about a half-dozen smaller leagues boasting members from areas ranging from New Zealand to South Africa, and Prospect Park’s Parade Ground has a new regulation-size court – the city’s first.

“America is the only country that does not know what netball is,” said a founding member of the Caribbean association, Gailene Windsor, a driving force behind the new court. “Netball is played in Israel – can you imagine that? – Singapore, Australia, Spain. Miss Universe was a netball player; she played netball in Botswana.”

Two of the Caribbean association’s 44 teams, Spice Girls and Typhoon, faced off on a recent Sunday in the first game at the Prospect Park court since it opened for the season.

At a little after noon, about a dozen solidly built women took off jeans and jackets, trading them for skirts and jerseys that have their positions initialed on them.

The sight of the women, seven to a team, in short, pleated skirts fiercely scrambling to get the ball through the hoop, won the attention of the Parade Ground’s droves of male athletes.

Three Hispanic men took a break from soccer to catch a glimpse of the action. One asked Ms. Windsor, who was serving as an umpire in the game, if netball is new. “No,” she said, happy to inform others about her sport.

“Basketball took over, but now netball is back.”

In 1891, when polo matches were still played at the Parade Ground, a Canadian immigrant named James Naismith mounted a peach basket on a pole in Massachusetts and invented basketball. According to the International Netball Federation, four years later a modified form of the sport was born from a misinterpretation of a drawing of a basketball court by Naismith, restricting players to certain zones. The game, in which players are allowed to dribble only once and must get the ball through the hoop without the help of a backboard, reached an English girl’s boarding school. From there, netball spread, such that a reported 7 million people play the sport today in some 70 countries.

The sport was just emerging in New York when Ms. Windsor arrived in 1980 from St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

“Netball has grown tremendously,” Ms. Windsor said, recalling that there were only six teams in Brooklyn at that time.

In 1992, the United States of America Netball Association was founded in New York, and three years later Ms. Windsor was one of the women who established the Caribbean association. Since then associations have been formed in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx.

With no regulation-size courts available, players have made do, drawing chalk lines on basketball courts and carrying portable nets.

While a couple of umpires complained that the new Prospect Park court was far from perfect – the rim was not flush with the pole, there was no space for an umpire to set up a table, and the nets were still not on the baskets – the court was a world apart from the more familiar turf at Lincoln Terrace Park in Crown Heights.

There, the poles are portable and the asphalt cracking. Still, the Caribbean association continues to conduct its tournaments at Lincoln Terrace every Sunday because it needs to hold games on more than one court at a time and have space for the 1,000-odd spectators that regularly show up.

Three times that number are expected to descend on Lincoln Terrace for the Caribbean Cup Championship this Sunday, when several New York-based expat teams will try to dethrone the de fending champion, Jamaica.

“There, everyone there knows what’s netball,” said Ms. Windsor during a break in the action at Prospect Park. “Here they’re coming and watching for the first time.”

Brooklyn’s borough president, Marty Markowitz, whose love for Caribbean immigrants has driven him to adopt a Trinidadian identity (he calls himself a Trini-Jew), was the driving force behind the new netball court.

Four years ago, when the president of the Prospect Park Alliance, Tupper Thomas, began to plan the $12.5 million renovation of the Parade Ground, she asked Mr. Markowitz’s advice. “He said to me, ‘If you’re going to redo these fields, you really should put netball in,'” Ms. Thomas said.

She took his advice. “The Parade Ground has always been the place for people of all ethnicities to play,” Ms. Thomas said, noting it was where baseball greats such as Sandy Koufax and Manny Ramirez got their start.

“Starting with polo and ending with netball.”