LOST GYMS: Indianapolis Washington outgrew its gym when powerhouse teams of 1960s took flight

By the time Ralph Taylor entered high school as a freshman at Indianapolis Washington in the fall of 1961, momentum was building for the Continentals’ basketball program.

Washington finished 21-3 that season under Jerry Oliver, just missing out on its first sectional title since 1948 after a back-and-forth battle at Southport against the host Cardinals in the sectional championship game.

But with players like Lou Craig, Joe Purichia and James Rhodes graduating from that team, nobody knew November of 1962 what the future looked like for Washington. Oliver planned to move sophomores Taylor and Billy Keller into the starting lineup, but 6-3 Clark Dickerson was his tallest regular.

“Things began to change rapidly,” Taylor said more than 60 years later.

Washington basketball was never the same. Those inexperienced sophomores in the fall of ’62 went 73-8 with three City titles over the next three seasons and eventually led the Continentals to their first state championship in 1965. Keller was voted Mr. Basketball. Taylor was third in the voting and named an Indiana All-Star.

And that was just the start of a decade of dominance for Washington, which won another state championship in 1969 with an entirely different group of players. Mr. Basketball George McGinnis was the engine that drove that group of Continentals, along with the likes of Steve Downing, Wayne Pack, Jim Arnold and Louie Day.

“It was electric,” Taylor said of Washington home games. “The gym held around 1,400 people. Everyone was on top of each other. You could smell the popcorn. There was always electricity in the air and we always had sellout crowds. It was basically a sellout by halftime of the reserve team games. Just fantastic fan support. It just inspired you to play harder than you even normally play.”

The problem – if you can call it a problem – is that Washington had outgrown its home gym by the 1960s. It was built in 1938 as part of sweeping facility improvements at several city schools. The $331,000 addition, which also included new classrooms, was formally dedicated on Dec. 2, 1938, with a game against Rushville. The gym allowed Washington to diminish the role of the previous gym, which was a stage in the auditorium.

The gym was still sparkling new when Harry Federspill started coming to Washington games in the 1940s. In 1948, Indiana All-Star center Bill Neimann led Washington to its first sectional championship. As Federspill remembers, Neimann was one of the first players to shoot a jump shot instead of the flat-footed style of the time.

“The referees had never seen that before,” Federspill said. “They stopped the game. They didn’t know what to do.”

Federspill, a 1952 Washington graduate, remembers looking at the court as a kid and thinking “I’d never be able to run up and down this floor.”

“When I was little, my dad built a basketball goal in the backyard for me,” he said. “Like a lot of people in Indiana, that’s how I got started.”

He eventually got his chance with the Continentals. His senior year, Washington lost 49-48 in front of 15,000 fans at Hinkle Fieldhouse in the first round of the sectional on a buzzer beater by Broad Ripple’s Ted Bosler. Just a week before, in a home game against Sacred Heart, Washington’s tournament status was put in jeopardy when a fight erupted on the court.

“The police came, the paddy wagons came, and we didn’t know if we were going to get in the sectionals or be barred,” Federspill said.

Phil Peterson, class of 1953, was in the middle of the hubbub. Peterson, who grew up in Haughville and would walk or hitchhike to games when he was in middle school, caught an elbow in the back of the head early in the fourth quarter from a Sacred Heart's Harlan Petty. Peterson turned around and took a swing.

“I kind of lost it,” Peterson said. “And I took a swing at him. Out I went.”

Peterson was thrown out of the game. But with under a minute left and Sacred Heart leading, Petty knocked down a Washington player. According to the Indianapolis News, a young man not from either school ran out of the crowd and slugged Petty. Several other fans got their shots in, too, as hundreds streamed on to the court.

For several days, it was unclear if the Indiana High School Athletic Association would take action against Washington or keep Peterson from playing in the sectional. Telling this story brings Peterson to tears all these years later.

“It all changed around, and I got to play,” Peterson said. “It turned out alright.”

Peterson made all-sectional as a senior. In his playing days, the Washington gym had a balcony on the west end and an athletic director’s office at the end of the court. The bleachers and scorer’s table came right up to the sideline. “It was always loud and noisy,” he said.

“The community was very much together,” Federspill said. “It was a neighborhood with a lot of factories around. We walked to school from wherever we lived. I walked quite a distance. A lot of players did. To me, I think I grew up in one of the great eras because of that. People were friendly. We didn’t have a lot of troubles or problems.”

Peterson continued to follow the Washington teams of the 1960s, regularly attending games. He traveled to Kentucky to watch McGinnis put up 53 points and 31 rebounds for the Indiana All-Stars in arguably the most famous game in the history of the annual series in 1969. Taylor jokingly calls Peterson “the godfather.”

“Everywhere they went, I went to it,” Peterson said. “I went to everything.”

You could point to Jan. 3, 1964, as the official date Washington outgrew its gym. Coach Howard Sharpe brought his undefeated Terre Haute Gerstmeyer to Washington to square off with the also unbeaten Continentals. All five starters finished in double figures, led by then-junior Taylor’s 18 points and 17 rebounds, as Washington blew open a close game in the third quarter to smash the Black Cats, 84-59.

But an even bigger story than the game that night was the crowd. An estimated 2,000 fans crammed into the gym, while at least that many were turned away. Fans from Gerstmeyer, which was not given any tickets, lined up outside the school at 2:30 p.m. It was so crowded in the gym that when Washington’s band stood up to play, the mob overflowed into their seats.

“The fire marshal was not happy with what we were doing,” Taylor said. “We were skirting the capacity limit.”

The gym was rededicated that night with several former players in attendance, including Boris “Babe” Dimancheff, a football star at Purdue and in the NFL. But from there forward, almost all of Washington’s “home” games were played elsewhere — Indiana Central, Butler or Tech, mostly.

“Our senior year, we only played one game at home,” said Eddie Bopp, a guard on the 1965 Washington team. “We played Shortridge (an 80-66 win). People were sitting on the floor, three rows deep, all around the floor. (The referees) were saying, ‘If you don’t take the ball all the way out with your feet, we’ll overlook it because you can’t step out of bounds.’ It was just way too small.”

But even as it hosted fewer games, the gym still remained a place of celebration for Washington. After the Continentals defeated Princeton and Fort Wayne North Side to win the state championship in 1965, the gym was packed with city leaders, students and alumni the following Monday to honor the team.

“I can remember as a freshman sitting in this gym and watching the varsity team play,” Taylor said. “Smelling the popcorn, everybody on top of each other. I remember we were playing Wood. And I remember sitting there watching Wood’s players who could jump out of the gym, blocking shots right and left, and thinking, ‘This is who it’s going to be when I’m on varsity?’”

The gym outlived its purpose to host varsity games. A modern new gymnasium was dedicated in November of 1976. But the old gym lived on as an auxiliary gym, hosting practices, physical education classes and the occasional sub-varsity level game. It had one last sendoff in May of 1976 when the state championship teams — billed as the David (1965) vs. Goliath (1969) — squared off in the old gym.

Taylor remembers Chet Coppock, then the sports director for WISH-TV, saying the ’69 team would dominate the ’65 squad in the battle of champions. The gym was sold out. McGinnis, who was with the Philadelphia 76ers at the time, did not play.

“We beat the ’69 team in overtime by eight points,” Taylor said. “Of course, McGinnis decided he wouldn’t play. But they figured Downing and the rest of the crew would beat us. But we handled them. They were shut up for at least another year.”

Taylor laughs at the memory. McGinnis, one of the most beloved players in the history of Indiana high school basketball, a gentle soul with an easy manner of making friends, died December of 2023 at age 73. McGinnis and the ’69 team were like “little” brothers to Taylor and the ’65 group. McGinnis and Day, like Taylor and his teammate, Marv Winkler, attended School 5 prior to Washington.

Being back here, in this gym, reminds Taylor of where it all started. Where School 5 became Washington. And where Washington became the city’s basketball team.

“What I think about it is all the different community neighborhoods where the students came from,” Taylor said. “There may have been a lot of differences I’m sure. But basketball brought everybody together. The one uniting force was the basketball team. Indianapolis always had a history of supporting any IPS team that makes it along the journey in the tournament. Most schools blend in their support and become supportive of the other schools. I’ll always remember how we galvanized all the different communities into one community.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 270-4904. Get IndyStar's high school coverage sent directly to your inbox with the High School Sports newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana high school basketball old gyms: Indianapolis Washington