Hoosier Gym

The brick gymnasium in Knightstown is where Hollywood came to play basketball. Built in nineteen twenty-one as the home court of Knightstown High School, it sat mostly empty for nearly twenty years after the school built a new facility in nineteen sixty-six. Then, in nineteen eighty-five, location scouts for a film called Hoosiers walked in and immediately knew they had found their gym.

The movie, starring Gene Hackman as the hard-luck coach of a small-town Indiana team that wins the state championship, became one of the most beloved sports films ever made. The gym stood in for the fictional Hickory Huskers' home court, and it attracted eighty thousand visitors a year in the decades that followed. When the gym faced possible demolition in nineteen eighty-eight, historic preservation groups stepped in to save it. Today it operates as a museum with film memorabilia, and the basketball court is still playable.