July 7, 2015: The New Providence “Roundhouse” gym.
A fictionalized take of a six-on-six girls’ basketball team in the final year of that sport’s existence in Iowa has been turned into a film.
The Des Moines Register says the film is called “New Providence” and the filmmaker was involved in using the school when it was closed.
Notice the word “fictionalized” up there, because there’s a significant change for the film: New Providence hasn’t existed as its own school district since 1980, when it merged with Eldora. In 1993, the school was being used as Eldora-New Providence Middle School. The gym is authentically 1930s, but the school building in front of it was torn down in 2012.
The actual Eldora-New Providence girls’ basketball team lost in the postseason to eventual state champion Hubbard-Radcliffe. The Register says Lisa Brinkmeyer, who played on that Hubbard-Radcliffe team, then at Drake, and later worked for the IGHSAU will be in this movie as a coach.
That said, and this being girls’ state basketball week, this is still a cool concept for a movie. (It’s not Robert John Ford’s musical take, which is fun in its own way.)