Oak Hill (2,110) Built 1959
January 9, 2024: Southwood vs. Oak Hill (Boys)
January 9, 2024: Southwood vs. Oak Hill (Boys)
I've made it to 68 different high school gyms across the state at this point. That's 68 different basketball programs I've been able to see firsthand. The cool thing about being involved in this hoops-crazed community is that you get to talk with a lot of like-minded people and hear a lot of stories about different schools you've never checked out yourself. You learn about the different legacies that are built in these programs and make a lot of connections to them tangentially through others. I've wanted to check out Oak Hill for a long time as I seem to have a lot of random links to people who have been involved with what they've built since the inception of the school in the early 60s. This made the trip to the dot on the map that is Meir, Indiana tonight a particularly satisfying one.
When I walked through the outer hallway and peered into the gym at Oak Hill, I was a little confused at what I was looking at. There were stairs going both up and down. I remembered then that my friend who played for the team a decade ago told me Oak Hill is kind of a sunken gym, but also kind of not. It's hard to visualize something like that without seeing it, but at that moment it made sense. The court itself is about 12-15 rows of bleachers below the main level of the school. You walk down a set stairs to get to the court, but then walk back up the retractable bleachers like you normally would. You also have the option of walking straight up a short set of stairs to the upper deck which is more like what you would typically find in a standard two-level gym. It's like someone took a normal 1960s gym and kind of just pushed it into the earth about 15 feet. I can't think of any other place that has a setup quite like it. Northwood is the only one that's kind of comparable.
The gym floor here is simple enough. The design and finish are fairly plain, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Each sideline has two sections of old plastic bleachers. They're not your typical beige color, but a little darker shade of brown that isn't nearly as offensive. If you just looked at the playing floor and bleachers, you wouldn't think that there's anything special going on here (though I do appreciate the official press row at the very top of one side of bleachers that had two(!) radio broadcasts going throughout the game). What really stands out to me here is what they've done with the vast wall space on each baseline above the small set of bleachers that sit at the bottom of each end of the court. On the wall that you enter from, the lower half is covered with a million community advertisements, which I don't really love but it's a part of most gyms now. Above them though are the gold standard for athletic accomplishment banners. Mercy, they are gorgeous. I'm biased, but I never thought anything would top Westview's. I think these might. First of all, they're huge and you can read the individual years from across the gym. They use different colors for the boys and girls which looks neat. They're clear, made of cloth, and old. Just perfection. My only tiny quibble is that they used hyphenated years in some places which clutters them slightly. The oppposite wall has some slightly less interesting state championships banners beside a really nice modern scoreboard. There's a great mural with a golden eagle smashing through the cinderblock wall, reminiscent of the one at CIC rival Mississinewa. There's a school track and field record wall that rivals the awesome one at West Noble. Last but not least there is a small window looking into the gym, maybe even more mysterious than a random door. Outside in the hallway are some really cool displays honoring past teams. It's a small thing, but a lot of schools don't do a great job with it.
The story of the rise and very gradual decline of pandemonium surrounding high school basketball in Indiana is really a story about the consolidation of town schools across the rural parts of the state. At its peak in the 1950s, well over 700 schools participated in the state tournament. That number was in the 400s by the 1980s where it remains today. When every small town had their own team that they could take an immense amount of pride and ownership in, the hysteria was at its height. Consolidations didn't put out that flame, but they did dim it a bit. That's definitely more true in some places than others. Oak Hill is not one of those places. The byproduct of three small school programs in Swayzee, Sweetser, and Converse that routinely punched above their weight class in the vaunted Marion sectional (just ask Jack Keefer), it still has a strong following that will show up to watch a Tuesday night nonconference game. It has a pair of state championships between the girls and boys programs in the last five years. That's probably enough to bring fans back to a good gym, but it doesn't really seem like they ever left.
