Shelbyville (Old) (3,500) Built 1922
January 2, 2025
January 2, 2025
For as much as I love old gyms, the specific names that schools give them have never really interested me that much. There's a reason I usually just refer to them as the name of the school on here. Most of the time if a gym has a specific name, it's just the name of the mascot with a generic venue tag on the end (Tiger Den, Warrior Dome, Knight's Castle). Other times it is named after a legendary coach or player. Many times the schools will just slap "Memorial" in between the name of the school and "Gym" in the title. Many of them really are meaningful, I just haven't paid much attention to them. There is one town though that has two beautiful gyms with two names that struck me a lot more than usual as I read about them and finally made it over to visit one of them. Paul Cross Gymnasium was home to the Shelbyville Golden Bears until 1967 when William (Bill) Garrett Gymnasium was built. The current gym is one of the most unique and renown gyms in the entire state. It's regularly mentioned with the other monumental arenas that are littered across the state. What people don't know is that the older gym in town is even more historic and home to one of the most important basketball stories our state and part of the country has ever seen.
Bill Garrett Gymnasium is named after a former player who made his mark playing in the old Paul Cross Gymnasium. Paul Cross was named after the first soldier from Shelbyville who died in WWI (The gym was built a mere four years after the Great War ended). If you haven't read Tom Graham's incredible book Getting Open, I cannot recommend it enough. It tells the story of Bill Garrett, who wasn't the first black basketball player at Shelbyville, but he was certainly the most impactful. He along with two of his black teammates grew up playing with a core of white students throughout junior high into high school. They formed the core of an unbelievable team that won the state championship during their senior year in 1947. While Bill Garrett and his other black teammates were accepted by their teammates, coach, and eventually most of the Shelbyville community, they faced unspeakable challenges from prejudiced communities all across the state that they had to repeatedly overcome. Bill Garrett then took it one step further, and with the help of some key members of the Shelbyville and Indianapolis communities, he became the first black player ever to suit up full-time for a Big Ten college basketball team when he joined the Indiana Hoosiers. He opened the door for countless black athletes not just in Shelbyville or even Indiana, but across the entire Midwest. If there was ever a reason for telling the story behind the name of a gym, it is his.
Bill Garrett and his teammates played many memorable games during their unprecendented run at Paul Cross Gymnasium. Today it doesn't look all too different than it did in 1947. It has been used for a long time now by the Shelbyville Parks and Recreation department for youth programs, basketball leagues, and walkers. The day I visited, those youth programs were in full swing so I didn't get as many extensive pictures as I normally would, but it was still obvious the gravitas that the gym once had. There are still shades of it when you visit in 2025. The gym has a simple setup with two large sections of seats along each sideline. There are two levels on each side that mirror one another. The upper levels have about 12 rows of permanent wood bleachers that are now over 100 years old. Both upper sections are built into the sideline wall and have a low roof above them. The old school support beams descend from the rafters obstructing views in a few spots. It looks cramped and dark, which is actually a good quality for an old gym!
Below are individual sections of retractable bleachers that stretch 9 rows high. On one side the upper bleachers can only be reached by climbing the retractable ones. So if they're rolled up, you're not getting up there. The other side has some stairs oddly running parallel to the sideline to reach the upper bleachers, but they were cordoned off when I visited so I did not venture up there either. The baseline walls are mostly bare. In the corners of the gym and high above one baseline wall there are old windows that have unfortunately been filled in at some point, though that's normal for gyms of this age. According to Kyle Neddenreip's Historic Hoosier Gyms, the other baseline wall once had a stage that was blocked in. You can see an indentation in the wall and it is also painted grey where the stage formerly was. I don't know how old the current hardwood court is, but it is stained a nice dark brown color you don't see often anymore in more modern gyms. The roofline above the court is a little unique in that all four sides slope gradually upwards towards one another and then meet in a big flat rectangle at the top.
The old gym in Shelbyville sets a new personal record for me in terms of the oldest gym I've visited so far that still looks like a gym, edging out Veedersburg by one year. Walking around the gym as kids ran and played, enjoying their last few days before going back to school, I had a lot of thoughts and feelings going on inside of me. I felt an incredible sense of heaviness regarding the history of the place. It's probably because I just got done reading Tom Graham's book where this gym is a big part of the setting, and while masterfully written, it conveys some very hard truths about the era when this gym was operating at its peak. It's hard for me to reconcile the love I have for the history of basketball in this state during a time when the high school basketball world was a scary place for many black kids who just wanted to play like their white peers. No one is going to champion the positive impact Hoosier Hysteria had on Indiana more than me, but I also can't ignore the fact that a lot of the best and brightest student athletes our state had to offer faced things we typically only associate with segregation in the deep south. That's not the case though. It was real, and it happened right here in our own towns and communities. It's thanks to the bravery of people like Bill Garrett and Johnny Wilson from my own town of Anderson that change started to come over time. I think it's time I start paying a little closer attention to the people behind the names of these gyms I love so much.