WESTVILLE – When Pam Groote first made the suggestion to her husband Peter, she didn’t quite know what she was getting herself into.
“I came in the room one day, I was like, maybe we should go to all the high school gyms. What do you think?” Pam said.
The problem was...
“I was like, wait a minute, how many gyms are there?” she said. “He’s like, 418. I was thinking 200.”
That was six years ago, and as of Saturday’s trip to Westville for its girls game with Culver, the Indianapolis couple had reached 181.
“This was supposed to be a retirement idea, but once we found out there were 418 gyms, we said, we’re not going to make it in retirement, so we’re going to start now,” Peter said. “We enjoy it.”
Peter maps out the schedule, while Pam does all the driving to the games. He has an at-home job with Cummins, while Pam works at North Central High School in Indianapolis, so most of the games are on weekends, and preferably a loop, like Saturday, when they went to North Judson and Chesterton during the day before Westville in the evening. Suffice it to say, they rest on Sunday.
“I do all the planning as far as what gym we’re going to,” he said. “We have a limit of an hour radius on weekdays. I try to look for good games. I haven’t found any. We try to get three or four in a week. The goal for every year is 50 new gyms.”
Westville marks six for the season, which gets busier with the boys starting next week.
“He made me a basketball fan,” Pam said. “It’s fun, it gives us something to do when there’s nothing else to do. Our daughter (Sarah) thinks it’s pretty cool, our son (Ben) kind of goes along with it. He’ll come to some games with us.”
Peter estimates that about half of the schools they have been to are within 60 minutes of Indianapolis.
“We just started tracking the mileage last year,” he said. “We’ve been more south and central.”
They have made it to each corner of the state, from Hammond Central to Jeffersonville to Evansville, Fort Wayne and Richmond.
A graduate of Knox, where he played in the early 1980s, Peter and Pam have also been to La Porte and LaCrosse among their northwest Indiana stops.
“LaCrosse, where you have to open the door and make sure the game’s not going on,” he said. “That’s very unique.”
Pam pointed out ‘The Cave’ at Mishawaka.
“The floor has light and the stands are dark,” she said.
At that time, Ron Hecklinski, Peter’s coach at Knox, was coaching Mishawaka.
“He started out of college at Knox as an assistant,” he said.
Even with all the planning, using links from the John Harrell basketball website to map schools, snafus arise.
“We’ve showed up for games where there was no game,” Pam said. “That always makes me happy.”
There was the time they traveled to Seeger, only to find out the boys and girls do not play in the same gym. The Grootes also went to a game at Scecina, even though Pam insisted they had been there before.
“We pulled in, she said, we’ve been here,” Peter said. “We walked in, I said, you’re right.”
As part of each trip, Pam finds a local restaurant to eat at before or after games.
“That’s my part,” she said. “We can do this, but I want to go somewhere local for dinner.”
Peter and Pam Groote have been to 181 high school gyms in Indiana, as of Saturday's stop at Westville, and hope to eventually make it to all of them, a venture the couple from Indianapolis began six years ago.