The most fun I had in college—or at least the most fun I’m willing to divulge on the internet—was on Dec. 11, 2010, fewer than four months into my freshman year at Fordham University. The men’s basketball team won a combined five games over the previous two seasons, but the Rams were the hottest ticket in New York City that night. The St. John’s Red Storm, Fordham’s much more successful quote-unquote rival, were visiting the Bronx for the first time in 10 years. Walking around campus hours before game time, there were already plenty of older Rams and Johnnies fans approaching students and asking them in their outer-borough accents if they were willing to part with their tickets to the game. The game was sold out, and the only chance of getting in was to hope one of the kids would accept some beer money in exchange for their spot in the student section.
The 3,200 fans lucky enough to be in Rose Hill Gym that night were treated to a thriller. St. John’s led by 12 at halftime and stretched its advantage to 21 early in the second half. Then the collapse began. Buoyed by a raucous home crowd, Fordham had two separate 16–0 runs to dig out of that massive hole and hung on to win, 84–81. After the buzzer sounded, we flooded out of the student section and onto the court.
Looking back on a basketball game I attended as an 18-year-old feels like ancient history, but on the glacial timescale of Rose Hill Gym, it might as well have been yesterday.
The gym celebrated its 100th anniversary in January, making it the second-oldest home arena currently in use in Division I basketball, and the oldest on-campus arena. It has hosted 1,801 combined men’s and women’s regular-season home games, but that’s just a fraction of Rose Hill’s story.
It has been the site of many of the most important high school games in the history of New York City, including Lew Alcindor’s, now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, final high school game. It has served as everything from an Army barracks (in 1943), to a set for music videos (“What’s Luv?” by Fat Joe and Ashanti) and a concert venue (for gigs by The Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel in the ’60s and The Ramones in ’84). Paul Simon returned to the gym in ’75 for a famous Saturday Night Live sketch in which he played one-on-one against Hall of Famer Connie Hawkins. Denzel Washington played at Rose Hill during his two seasons on the Fordham JV team in the early ’70s. Decades before he became the iconic voice of the NBA Finals, Mike Breen began exclaiming “Bang!” after big shots made by Rams players while he was a student in the stands at Rose Hill, then started using the catchphrase calling games for the student radio station, WFUV.
Rose Hill Gym may not be as well-known as the famous cathedrals of college basketball like the Palestra, Hinkle Fieldhouse, Rupp Arena, Cameron Indoor Stadium and Assembly Hall, but it punches well above its weight in terms of both its historical significance and its charm. Even the most dedicated college hoops fans might not be familiar with Rose Hill—and that’s more than understandable. Fordham’s men’s basketball program has spent most of the last three decades languishing at the bottom of the Atlantic 10. But despite its small size, its obscurity and the men’s team’s on-court struggles, Rose Hill is college basketball’s most overlooked gem—a historic venue of an endangered species and a link to the game’s past during a period of immense change in college sports.
Rose Hill Gym was built in 1925 out of locally quarried gray bedrock—the same stone that supports the towering skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, nine miles to the south of Fordham’s campus in the Bronx. With its high arches, stained glass windows and heavy wooden front doors, it would be easy to mistake the building’s facade for a chapel (as if the Jesuit university was lacking those). The interior’s high gabled ceiling is supported by a latticework of steel trusses and is also reminiscent of a church nave. The large translucent windows on either end bathe the interior in warm natural light for games on sunny weekend afternoons—again, not unlike sitting in a pew at a Saturday evening vigil mass. But even the world’s biggest organ couldn’t make a church sound as loud as Rose Hill gets when it’s full.
“There have been environments over the last 10 years that genuinely make you worry that some of the stones are going to fall off the walls,” says Mike Watts, a Fordham alum who now does play-by-play for Rams home games.
This is Rose Hill’s defining characteristic. Other arenas may have 20,000 fans rattling the rafters, but Rose Hill is uniquely suffocating. There isn’t an inch of wasted space in the small gym, which means the players and fans are right on top of each other. And when the crowd gets loud, the bare stone walls of the gym offer nowhere for that noise to go.
“There’s an echo to the place,” Breen says. “I know nothing about acoustics, but there always seemed to be a little echo, so a big roar from the crowd might last a little bit longer than in other places because of that echo.”
The Fordham men’s team’s success is often directly correlated to the volume of the home crowd. When the fans are in full throat, opponents crumble under the blanket of noise. That happened repeatedly in the 2022–23 season, the Rams’ first under coach Keith Urgo, when they went 25–8 overall and 18–2 at home.
“It was absolutely electric,” Urgo says of the environment that season. “Guys like Mark Schmidt of St. Bonaventure came that year saying, ‘Usually, I’ve never not had the majority of the fans be St. Bonnies fans in here. We couldn’t get tickets. It’s the loudest I’ve ever heard it and I couldn’t believe how much it affected us.’ [Duquesne’s] Keith Dambrot said, ‘When that place is full, it might be the best home court advantage in the country.’ [Saint Louis’s] Travis Ford said it. [UMass’s] Frank Martin said next time he came through he was gonna wear his football helmet because it was so intense and rowdy.
“The feeling that year was electric. It was just so loud and energetic and deafening. It was as good of a home court advantage as there is in the country. And that’s why that year we had the best home record in all of Division I.”
Unfortunately for Urgo, though, he and his team weren’t able to replicate that success. The Rams finished 13–20 last season (6–11 at home) and are 11–20 headed into this week’s Atlantic 10 tournament.
The challenge, especially lately, is getting fans to pack the gym and turn up the decibel level. Urgo believes that bigger crowds will come with more consistent success on the court.
“We gotta win. The winning brings fans. ‘If you build it they will come,’ is the old Field of Dreams cliché for a reason,” he says. “We have to do our part. The only way you get that consistent tradition built is if you have some consistency.”
Plenty of higher-profile teams have found out how difficult an environment Rose Hill can be when the fans are in full force. In addition to that 2010 St. John’s upset, the Rams men’s team also knocked off the No. 22 Harvard Crimson in ’12, beat St. John’s again in ’15 and defeated a tournament-bound VCU Rams team in ’17. Fordham finished below .500 in all of those seasons. The same goes for the ’12–13 season, when the Rams took the No. 11 Butler Bulldogs down to the wire in a 68–63 thriller at a sold-out Rose Hill. But those big victories are few and far between. Over the past 20 seasons, the Fordham men are 8–33 at home against teams that went on to qualify for the NCAA tournament, and five of those eight wins are against Northeast Conference and Ivy League teams.
But Rose Hill is a destination worthy of any college basketball fan’s bucket list regardless of the home team’s résumé.
“If you have any love for the history of the game, it’s a place that needs to be seen,” Breen says. “If you like the movie Hoosiers and that little gym that they played in, it’s something like that. It’s like the Fenway Park of college basketball. It’s this place that was built so many years ago and still has some magic to it. I just think it’s one of the great places to see a game because it makes you think about the history of the game. Because that used to be the norm. Now it’s the exception, a building like that.”
Some of the biggest brands in college basketball used to play in places like Rose Hill. The Georgetown Hoyas played in the 2,200-seat McDonough Gymnasium as late as 1981. The North Carolina Tar Heels spent the 1920s and ’30s playing in a gym so bare-bones it was known as the Tin Can. John Wooden coached his first 17 seasons with the UCLA Bruins at the 2,000-seat Men’s Gym. But Rose Hill is a rarity. While plenty of D-I teams play in gyms smaller than Rose Hill, they’re almost exclusively low-major teams from conferences like the Big South, Patriot League and MAAC. Fordham, on the other hand, plays in the Atlantic 10, which routinely sends multiple teams each year to the men’s NCAA tournament. (The A-10 has been a multi-bid league in 18 of the past 19 seasons.) Only four men’s programs in the top 11 conferences by NET ranking this season play in gyms smaller than Fordham’s (La Salle, Florida Atlantic, San Francisco and Pepperdine).
When his Butler team visited in 2013, then-Bulldogs coach Brad Stevens, now the president of the Boston Celtics, gushed about the gym’s charm but also likened it to the gym where he played his high school games in a small town in Indiana.
“I love Rose Hill Gymnasium. I think it’s one of the neatest places that I’ve coached in,” Stevens said. “I played in a 3,000-seat gym in Zionsville, Indiana, that was later torn down that was straight out of the movie Hoosiers, and that’s kind of what I was reminded of when I walked in here. I’m a huge fan.”
Urgo, whose father played at Rose Hill as a member of Fordham’s freshman team in 1955, spins the gym’s small size as an opportunity to increase demand for tickets, pointing to the arenas at two of his previous stops as examples of why bigger isn’t always better.
“In today’s day and age, they’re downsizing in some ways because of TV. For instance, when Villanova [renovated the Finneran Pavilion in 2016], they didn’t expand it. I think they may have even shrunk it a couple of hundred, because you want the demand,” Urgo says. “Two years ago [at Fordham], there were lines out the door the last four or five games, there were five to seven hundred students who couldn’t get in the game. You want that demand. You don’t want it to be [where] you just go whenever you want and get a ticket. At Penn State, we’d have 12,000 people at a Saturday afternoon white-out game and half the upper deck would still be empty because it sat 15,500. You’d have 7,000 and it’d be half empty, but 7,000 would be too much for the Finn at Villanova. So you want it intimate, you want it to be a tough ticket to get.”
That intimacy is what keeps fans like Breen coming back to Rose Hill year after year, regardless of the team’s success.
“I love going to the gym,” says Breen, who still makes time in his busy announcing schedule to attend a couple of Fordham games each season. “Obviously I love the school, but it’s just a cool place to watch a game. There’s very few places where you can see high-level basketball in a building like that. They just don’t exist anymore.
“You’re in the last row, you feel like you can reach out and touch one of the players. If you’re in the last row you feel like a player running down the court’s sweat can fall on you,” he says. “Every seat, you’re right there. You’re right on top of the action. You can hear the officials talk to the coaches. You can hear the players talk to each other. That intimacy is what made it special and why it’s still special today.”
Rose Hill is one of those venues, though, where the game is almost secondary to the building itself. In the same way that fans come from all over to see Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and the Los Angeles Coliseum, the draw of seeing a game at Rose Hill is the ability to soak in the history of the game in an endangered species of a building.
“As a fan, in those newer arenas, you’re not going to remember anything about the arena,” says Ryan Ruocco, Breen’s ESPN colleague and another Fordham/WFUV alum. “I feel that way about most arenas in the NBA that I call games in. Not many NBA arenas hold a place of value as the building itself when I leave the arena.
“Places that Rose Hill kind of reminds me of are Fenway Park, the old Yankee Stadium, the Garden, buildings where there’s something about it that you’re like, this is different. Just the building itself is an experience. That’s where it holds significant memory for me. And I think for anyone who goes in there, they’re like, ‘Wow, that was different.’ Rather than, ‘I just watched a basketball game in a cookie-cutter arena I’ve been in a million times.’ If you watch a game in Rose Hill, you play in a game in Rose Hill, you are going to remember that experience.”
Ruocco says he had primarily been a baseball fan before he arrived on campus at Fordham, but calling games at Rose Hill “shaped my love of basketball play-by-play.”
“The energy and the action of calling basketball is awesome,” he says. “I think some of what gripped me right away was feeling the atmosphere of Rose Hill, which was such a unique, intimate, lively venue. And so even though our teams weren’t particularly great, the building was, and it made those games feel big.”
There is only one Division I arena older than Rose Hill, and it’s living on borrowed time. Matthews Arena, the home of the Northeastern Huskies basketball and hockey programs, was built in 1910 on reclaimed marshland and was found last year to be structurally unsound. The school has proposed replacing the venue, formerly known as Boston Arena and once home to the Celtics, Bruins and Whalers, with a new modern facility, although the building’s short-term future is still up in the air. Northeastern has not announced where its basketball and hockey teams will play their 2025–26 seasons.
Rose Hill, meanwhile, is fit as a fiddle. The gym has undergone various renovations in recent years, including a replacement of the court and the addition of two large videoboards. The 2022 renovation of the adjacent student center exposed more of the old gym’s original structure and integrated it more seamlessly with its newer neighbor. Fans now walk through a sleek and undeniably modern glass-ceilinged atrium before entering the gym and stepping back in time.
“I think it’ll be here for another 50 years,” Fordham athletic director Charles Guthrie says. “It’s very similar to most of the buildings on the Fordham campus where they were done very well. Architecturally, it’s beautiful. You have the doors when you come in like coming into a chapel. I know Rose Hill will be around long after I’m past this Earth.”
The building is well-maintained, but its age is the source of a fair number of drawbacks, too, the most significant is its size. When it was first built, it was considered so incredibly large that it was nicknamed “The Prairie.” Today, its 3,200 seats place it among the smallest venues in Division I. It’s the second-smallest arena in the Atlantic 10, ahead of only La Salle’s John Glaser Arena (3,000 seats), and less than half the size of the average A-10 arena (6,672 seats). The school briefly experimented with playing in larger venues, moving four conference home games in 2011 to the Izod Center in New Jersey’s Meadowlands, but those games at the former home of the Nets were an unmitigated disaster. They averaged fewer than 1,800 fans, 600 fewer than the four conference games played on campus that season.
There are nights in Rose Hill when there are plenty of empty seats left open for the ghosts of the past. The Rams do sell out games from time to time, but fan support ebbs and flows. The gym was roughly half full on average this season, with an average of 1,570 fans per game. Can you blame the fans for not throwing their full weight behind a men’s team that has had a winning record in conference play just once in the last 18 seasons? Hardly. But it’s a chicken-and-egg scenario. Is the gym rarely full because the team is a perennial basement-dweller or is the team lousy because it lacks enthusiastic support?
The century-old gym comes with pros and cons for the men’s basketball program. Urgo says he sells recruits on the historic nature of it being the oldest on-campus arena in the country and will show them videos of how energetic the arena can be when it’s full, but prospective players consider other factors, as well.
“Believe it or not, recruits aren’t really that caught up in [home arena size] anymore as they are in NIL and more the practice facility situation, the locker room and lounges,” Urgo says. “Because they’re more concerned with where they spend most of their time—24-hour access to a practice facility, a lounge and locker room area where they can hang out. They’re more concerned with those types of facilities and amenities than they are where they play 18 total games.”
And in terms of those additional amenities like lounges and practice facilities, the school is quick to admit that it’s lacking.
“I feel like the next iteration of college basketball is not so much about playing in a fancy arena, but more so having a space on campus where you can play 24/7 as a student-athlete, have access to modernized training rooms and weight rooms,” Guthrie says. “And those are the areas where we’ve got to improve at Fordham in this next wave of college athletics.”
Improvement will require investment and plenty of spatial creativity. There isn’t a lot of empty space on Fordham’s urban campus to build new facilities, so Guthrie suggests that Murphy Field, the football and soccer teams’ practice field, could be replaced with an athletic facilities building that features a field on the roof.
“Most schools are going up in urban cities, where that field will actually be on top of a roof but down below will be potentially more square footage to put more of these ancillary [facilities],” Guthrie says. “So that’s what we’re going to be modeling out. How do we take advantage of our current footprint and go up, rather than just put one turf field there and all of a sudden you take away a big footprint. It’s going to be a little more creative. You look at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. You look at LIU Brooklyn. San Diego State, their soccer field is actually on top of a garage. I think we’ve got to be a little more creative with our space here at Fordham.”
Fordham boasts plenty of athletic achievements, but its most significant are as ancient as Rose Hill Gym. The football team is best known for its success before World War II, when Vince Lombardi was part of the offensive line unit known as the “Seven Blocks of Granite,” although the Rams have made four FCS playoff appearances since 2013. The baseball team is the winningest in Division I history, primarily because it began playing in 1859. Some of the school’s athletic programs have enjoyed more recent success. The softball program had a dynastic run of 10 NCAA tournament appearances between 2010 and ’22. The men’s soccer team won the conference championship in ’14, ’16 and ’20, and the men’s water polo team went undefeated this season until losing in the Final Four of the NCAA tournament.
But in New York City, basketball is king, and it’s been a rough few decades for Fordham men’s hoops. The men’s team hasn’t made the NCAA tournament since 1992 and has had a winning record in conference play just three times since moving from the Patriot League to the A-10 for the ’95–96 season. The women’s program has been more successful, earning March Madness spots in 2014 and ’19, but the men’s team has been spinning its wheels for the better part of 30 years.
Whether or not the Fordham men ever become a contender in the A-10, Rose Hill is a venue that any college basketball fan—any sports fan—needs to visit. There are so few places like it in American sports that are still surviving—a relic of a bygone era that has been lovingly maintained and carefully modernized so that it remains standing for the current generation of basketball fans to enjoy without sacrificing the old-school charm that allows fans to transport themselves back in time. There are bigger arenas with better sound systems, more comfortable seats and more successful teams. Other arenas have bathrooms and don’t have a giant support beam smack dab in the middle of the home locker room. There are other antique throwback arenas, too. But there is only one Rose Hill.
“It’s not going to drop your jaw because it’s cavernous and it’s got the most unique in-game entertainment or the best basketball you’ve ever seen,” Watts says. “It’s a gym that almost serves as a diary of college basketball through every era and every iteration that exists of it. Choosing to come to a game at Rose Hill Gym is choosing to write your name in that ledger and be a guest of college basketball.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as College Basketball’s Overlooked Gem Turns 100.
