By Rodney Haas 

605 Sports 

HURON — When the best Class B girls basketball teams first walk into the Huron Arena for the week’s State Class B tournament, perhaps they will have their very own “Hoosiers” moment. 

The same feeling that was depicted in the 1986 movie “Hoosiers” starring the late Gene Hackman about a high school in rural Indiana advancing to the championship game. The look on the players faces when they walk into the enormous arena while comparing it in size to their high school gymnasium. Perhaps there might even be a coach with a tape measure to make sure the hoops are at the right height. 

Just like the 1951 version of the Butler Fieldhouse where the scene was filmed, the Huron Arena evokes the same mid-20th century architecture in arena design with the intimate seating configuration and the exposed steel rafters.  

While it might lack the suites and the premium club seating that you find at newer arenas, what the Huron Arena lacks, it gains by taking a trip back in time. 

“There's just a different level of intimacy to it, as close as the crowd is and even in the balcony seating, you're really right there to the game,” said Huron athletic director Scott DeBoer. “I think just the intimacy of the crowd adds something that some of those modern facilities don’t.” 

When fans and players arrive Thursday, they will notice something different to the 74-year-old building, new video scoreboards that bring a touch of modernism to the timeless relic.  

“It's a cool kind of contrast with the old rafters and coliseum style set up and yet you've got some really modern flair to it now with some of those video and digital displays,” DeBoer said. The capabilities that we've got …. we're still really in the infancy stages of learning how to use them and maximize them but I've got some people that are learning fast. That's for sure.”

The $1.5 million project, which was approved by the Huron School District, which owns the arena includes a new overhanging videoboard along with a video ribbon on the north side and a video display on the south end. It’s part of a larger project that includes the installation of a new scoreboard with video display and play clocks that will be installed this spring at the football stadium.  

“It gives us some cool capabilities with the video component and some different opportunities for our advertisers,” DeBoer said. “It gives us different ways to enhance the player and fan experience with just the kind of information we can put up. We can segment off different parts of those displays to promote whatever we want in terms of the game or fan experience or player information.” 

The new scoreboard replaces the previous one, which according to DeBoer was in its 20th year and way past its recommended lifespan by its manufacturer Daktronics.

Installation began at the end of January and concluded at the end of February, giving DeBoer and his staff some games to get used to the new system including Saturday’s Class AA SoDak16 game. 

“It's really a fun time to kinda be here and just see the progression of it,” DeBoer said of the scoreboard installation. “Even as they were installing different parts of it, you could feel a movement with each stage of the install, like a modernization. I don't have a better word for it than that.”

The Sioux Falls Lincoln Patriots and the Huron Tigers warmup prior to a boys basketball Friday, Jan. 17, 2025 at the Huron Arena in Huron. (Rodney Haas / 605 Sports)
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Built in 1951, the arena’s first game didn’t consist of a Huron High School game or a now defunct Huron College basketball game. Instead it featured an NBA exhibition game between the then-Minneapolis (Los Angeles) Lakers and the Syracuse Nationals, now the Philadelphia 76ers. It was a game that saw Watertown High School and Huron College graduate Gene Smith get the start for the Lakers before the largest crowd ever to see a basketball game in South Dakota with 5,362 fans in attendance. 

“That tells you the state of the NBA too. I can't imagine we'd get the NBA to play an exhibition here, but that tells you a little bit that it was designed to be a sports venue,” DeBoer said. 

According to DeBoer, he believes the arena was built to draw people to Huron. He added the design was really the only building style at the time that could accommodate large crowds for a sports venue. 

The arena opened 10 years before the Sioux Falls Arena (1961) and 26 years before the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center (1977) — both have been replaced by its more modern counterparts the Denny Sanford Premier Center and the Summit Arena. Yet the Huron Arena continues to stand the test of time. 

“You think about what it was like in the 1950s and how it's stood the test of time. It's kind of a cool story in itself,” DeBoer said. “The fun part is people will come through here, and because it has such a history, everybody has stories of games they watched or certain athletes. It seems like everybody's got different memories that kind of weave it together into a pretty cool history.”

For DeBoer, who is in his first year as athletic director for the school and a Huron High graduate, he remembers standing on the south endline watching Matt Jones and Alpena/Wessington Springs and Crow Creek playing in a region game.

But perhaps the most vivid memory was how they changed the team names on the scoreboard. 

“A lot of people remember the scoreboard update,” DeBoer said. “Now obviously we can change stuff in the computer, but it used to be that the scoreboard would come down to the floor and then they would replace the team names and raise the scoreboard back up.” 

While it may lack the bells and whistles of the more modern facilities, the Huron Arena makes up for being a place of history and nostalgia. 

It’s a place where for nearly 75 years, generations of South Dakotans have fond memories of watching great players that came before, and a place where even more memories will be made this weekend, with a modern touch.     

“Saturday night after our (SoDak16) game, people were leaving and I'm hearing comments that this is still the best place in South Dakota to watch a basketball game,” DeBoer said. “I've heard that from people. They come through here; they just appreciate there's a vantage point for every seat in the house. It holds its sound really well, so it gets loud in there pretty quickly and pretty easily. Then I think there is just that nostalgia to it that everybody has an association with and each time you walk in there there's a chance to add another layer to that piece.”