Once a Midwest mecca for AAU basketball, Spiece Fieldhouse has a new future: Pickleball.

Between my son’s games at the GRBA (Gym Rats Basketball Association) National Championship last weekend in Fort Wayne, I slipped away to visit Spiece Fieldhouse.

For a generation of basketball players, Spiece Fieldhouse was the mecca. For events like the Memorial Day Run-N-Slam in May and the GRBA National Championship in July, Fort Wayne was packed with hundreds of the best players and teams, mostly from the Midwest, with Spiece Fieldhouse the center of it all.

Memories are a funny thing. I remember the basketball, obviously. Covering players like Marquis Teague, Gary Harris and Demetrius Jackson. I remember when Trey Lyles, Trevon Bluiett, James Blackmon Jr. and P.J. Thompson were just coming up, maybe going into their sophomore year, getting ready to play on Court 1.

But in this now-empty parking lot outside Spiece Fieldhouse, I remembered how on a weekend like this there would be nowhere to park. As you walked outside, often in the sweltering July heat, you might walk past a frustrated coach laying into his team between games in the shade. You might also see Roy Williams, Brad Stevens or Tom Izzo walking to the entrance.

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Once you walked inside, the place was alive. Not just with the noise of whistles, bouncing basketballs and shouts from coaches and fans from the eight courts. Tom Spiece, a sporting goods owner who opened the 150,000-square-foot center in 2000 with basketball courts, a fitness center, running track and a 45,000-square-foot retail outlet, filled the place with jerseys and memorabilia on the walls and from the ceiling. Spiece’s loyalties to Indiana basketball were obvious, too, with the awning around the courts pained candy-stripe red-and-white.

Spiece Fieldhouse felt “big time” as much, I guess, as AAU basketball can feel “big time.” The physical presence of the building, combined with the players from the Gym Rats basketball program founded in 1992 by Bill Hensley and Gerald Hirschy that called Spiece Fieldhouse its home base, combined to help make Fort Wayne a happening place on the grassroots circuit.

But as I pulled up through the empty parking lot to Spiece Fieldhouse, I knew it had seen better days. In fact, just a few days earlier, that basketball was leaving Spiece Fieldhouse entirely for … pickleball. Yes. Pickleball. Ace Pickleball Club owners TK Herman and Scott Howard plan to turn the basketball facility into a 21-court pickleball club.

I was not aware Saturday if that process had started yet or not. I braced myself. But no. The basketball courts and baskets were still there. Chairs were upturned on the tables in the cafeteria. I pointed out to my wife and younger son the wall where they would post the updated tournament brackets on the walls (yes, the days before we had apps on our phone for such things) and remembered I’d seen quite a few Kentucky Derbys in this gym.

It was so … quiet. A lot of coaches will tell you a quiet gym is a losing gym (meaning: “TALK ON DEFENSE!”). Not the same thing here exactly, but appropriate. In recent years, Spiece Fieldhouse was no longer the basketball mecca it once was. The Gym Rats moved out of the fieldhouse six years ago and into the SportONE Parkview Fieldhouse, an eight-court facility that now hosts many of Fort Wayne’s biggest basketball events. There is also the massive Plassman Athletic Center at Turnstone, which opened in 2015 with four college-sized basketball courts.

Fort Wayne is not hurting for basketball options. But still. For Spiece Fieldhouse, once so filled with life, to sit here quietly with the GRBA National Championship going on? Eerie. I posted a few photos of my visit inside the fieldhouse the following day on Twitter. That post has 122,800 views. Wild.

“Dang great memories there,” wrote DeShaun Thomas, the 2009 Mr. Basketball from Fort Wayne.

There were many other messages. Mostly sad. Many wondering why. “Hard to put in into words but this place had some magic in it for sure,” wrote Jordon Kedrowski, now a graduate assistant at Saint Louis University.

Years ago, I wrote about old high school gyms in Indiana that were no longer used as high school gyms. To this day, it is probably in the top five stories I’ve written in 23 years in this business for reader feedback. It led to writing the only book I’ve written (shameless plug for Historic Hoosier Gyms). But the point is: Shared experiences of a special time and place are special. And for many years, that special time and place for many basketball players was Spiece Fieldhouse in Fort Wayne.

Unless you want to have your heart broken further, please do not look up Spiece Fieldhouse on Twitter. There was a video posted Tuesday of the workers pulling up the hardwood basketball courts. Maybe pickleball is the wave of the future. Maybe it will bring more money to Fort Wayne. Maybe Spiece Fieldhouse will be better off for it in the long run. We should hope so.

I’m not against pickleball. Owning and maintaining a building like Spiece Fieldhouse is incredibly difficult financially. If they can make it work, good for Ace Pickleball Club. But I think I’d like my last image of Spiece Fieldhouse to be a basketball venue where, once upon a time, the best of the best competed.

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.