Forest Park High School players jumped off their sideline seats as their team scored on a 3-point shot during an Indiana High School Athletic Association sectional championship game in Huntingburg, Ind. (Photo by Michael E. Keating)

Let’s say you happen to be in Indiana and you run across a basketball court — and let’s just stop right there. You go to Indiana, it’s hard to imagine you won’t run across a basketball court. They’re like Starbucks there, only it may be easier to get a seat at Starbucks.

“Indiana is known as a place where basketball is sort of like the sport,” said Michael E. Keating, a photographer. “It’s kind of like the religion. If basketball’s a religion, then the gymnasiums — they’re the places where people worship. They’re the churches, the temples.”

For the past several years, Mr. Keating and his colleague Chris Smith have crisscrossed the state, traveling more than 10,000 miles and photographing more than 100 school gymnasiums. There is no lack of choices. People in Indiana, as anyone who saw the 1986 movie “Hoosiers” knows, view basketball the way Southerners view football. Texas can keep its Friday night lights. Nine of the country’s 10 biggest high school gyms, the photographers say, are in Indiana.

They both say the appeal is not really the basketball. “We’re there for everything that surrounds the game,” Mr. Keating said.

Mr. Smith said, “We like to have people in the gyms.” But for the photographers, it’s fine if it is just a practice or even a graduation. “When there was some kind of activity,” he said, “the gyms kind of came to life.”

Continue reading (and check out the slideshow) In the Temples of Indiana High School Basketball