https://twitter.com/PaulsenDave/status/817794125105950729
Dave PaulsenVerified account@PaulsenDave
Awesome article on historic venue. Chance to bring our team there in December was on my bucket list!
"In 1926, the University of Pennsylvania went all-in on basketball. The game had only been invented 35 years earlier and wasn't formally played on college campuses until the start of the 1900s. None of those schools would compete for an organized national championship until 1938.
At Penn, they broke ground on what amounted to the largest basketball-specific structure in the country. It would not be a multi-use arena. It would be a building -- strong and sturdy with 10 steel trusses bolstering an arched, windowed ceiling -- built only for basketball. It was an entirely novel concept.
The first game was Jan. 1, 1927. Penn beat Yale in front of over 10,000 people. The experiment was a wild success and a wave grew, sweeping across the landscape. A little over one year later, Hinkle Fieldhouse opened at Butler. In 1938, Gallagher-Iba Arena opened at Oklahoma State. In 1940, Cameron Indoor Stadium opened at Duke. Down the line, Allen Fieldhouse at Kansas came in 1955. Each was built with design elements of the Palestra.
The game took off. In 1939, Ohio State, Brown, Villanova and Wake Forest all came to the Palestra for the East Regional of the first-ever NCAA Tournament. They decided to play it on the second week of March. The idea stuck.
As the sport and the NCAA Tournament grew, the Palestra became the tie that binds the fabric of college basketball. To this day, it's hosted more tournament games (52) than any other building, despite not doing so since 1984."
"On Saturday, Michigan State will take the floor at the Palestra (1 p.m., TV: ESPN). It will be the Spartans' sixth all-time visit, but first since 1966. They will face Penn State, which is using one of its eight allotted Big Ten home games to play for an outing in Philadelphia; both because its actual home court at Bryce Jordan Center is a barren air hangar and because recruiting players out of Philly is coach Pat Chambers' modus operandi. The game was suggested by Chambers and accepted by Tom Izzo, who has long wanted to cross the Palestra off his bucket list."