Before the Big 5 Was a Tradition, It Was a Plan for the Palestra

The first Big 5 game did not fill the Palestra. On December 14, 1955, Saint Joseph’s beat Villanova, 83–70, before 2,636 spectators. Al Juliana, a reserve for the Hawks, scored 22 points. It was the opening game of a new series among five Philadelphia-area colleges, though the size of the crowd gave little indication of how closely the city would come to identify that series with Penn’s arena.

Ten weeks later, 9,387 people watched Saint Joseph’s beat Temple, 77–68, and clinch the title. The round robin’s final game came a week later, on February 29. All ten matchups were played at the Palestra. What began with a modest audience ended its first season with a title-clinching crowd larger than the arena’s reported post-renovation capacity of 9,100. (archives.upenn.edu)

Original charcoal editorial illustration evoking a mid-century college basketball game at the Palestra; interpretive scene, not a documented play.

The contrast invites a familiar story: a Philadelphia institution announcing itself to the world. But the Big 5 did not arrive fully formed as a beloved tradition. Before there could be a city title to settle on the court, five schools had to agree on a schedule, a building, and the practical terms of sharing it. At Penn, the discussion of a new basketball series met another pressing question: how to make better use of the Palestra, and what the arena needed in order to serve that purpose.

The Palestra had opened in 1927. By the mid-1950s, Penn was considering improvements that went beyond adding seats. The proposed work included refurbished team and shower rooms, new backboards, and the reinstallation of ventilation. More capacity would mean little without the facilities to handle teams and spectators. The building was already a prominent college basketball venue; Penn was preparing it for heavier use. (philadelphiaencyclopedia.org)

The first documented proposal for what became the Big 5 came in May 1954. Penn suggested that it, Temple, Villanova, La Salle, and Saint Joseph’s coordinate their basketball schedules and use the Palestra as a shared home floor. The aims were plainly practical: avoid conflicting doubleheaders, reduce promotional costs, and put the arena to fuller use. (archives.upenn.edu)

That proposal did not create basketball rivalry in Philadelphia. The programs existed, and their games already mattered to the schools that played them. What it offered was a regular arrangement: every school would meet the others in a city series, with one court serving as its common stage. A game involving two rivals would also have a place in a larger contest that all five could follow.

Penn president Gaylord P. Harnwell formally announced the cooperative arrangement on behalf of the schools’ presidents in November 1954. The initial agreement was for five years, beginning with the 1955–56 season. Turning the idea into games required continuing work among athletic officials on scheduling, promotion, television, and tickets. Those details were not separate from the Big 5’s identity. They determined whether five institutions could make a shared competition operate inside a building owned by one of them. (archives.upenn.edu)

Money was part of the bargain, too. According to Penn Athletics’ account, ticket and concession revenue would be shared after Penn was reimbursed for the Palestra’s upkeep and operating costs. The arrangement acknowledged both sides of the venture: Penn supplied and maintained the court, while the other schools helped make a fuller schedule, and fuller houses, possible. (philadelphiaencyclopedia.org)

The facilities plan moved alongside the series plan. On April 15, 1955, Penn trustees considered a loan of up to $60,000 for the Palestra Double Header Budget. The proposed additional seating was intended to bring capacity to about 10,000, along with the work on rooms, backboards, and ventilation. That figure was a target, not the arena’s final reported capacity. After the work, the stated capacity was 9,100. (archives.upenn.edu)

It would be too simple to say that new stands caused the Big 5, or that the Big 5 existed solely to pay for new stands. The records support a more useful account: Penn’s interest in a better-equipped, more heavily used arena and the schools’ interest in a coordinated city series reinforced one another. A schedule could bring people into the building. Improvements could help the building accommodate the schedule.

By September 1955, The Daily Pennsylvanian was reporting that the five teams would compete in a round-robin series at the Palestra. Construction of the additional stands began that fall. The student newspaper reported that the new seating would bring spectators closer to the sidelines. The physical change suited the competition being planned: more people would be able to gather in one place to watch schools that otherwise played on separate campuses and separate schedules. (archives.upenn.edu)

The Palestra’s role was central, but it did not make the schools interchangeable. Penn, Temple, Villanova, La Salle, and Saint Joseph’s brought their own teams and followings to the series. The shared floor gave each game a relationship to the others. A result could matter not only to the two teams playing but to the standings of the entire group. Over a season, the city could watch a title take shape one matchup at a time.

That was still a promise when Saint Joseph’s and Villanova played the opener. Saint Joseph’s later recalled that Villanova students were away for Christmas break and that the first game was not initially regarded as a historic occasion. Such recollections, made years afterward, should not be mistaken for what everyone thought on the night. The attendance figure is enough to make the point: whatever the organizers hoped the series might become, its first game was no instant sellout. (sjuhawks.com)

There is something revealing about that unceremonious start. The plan’s success did not depend on one spectacular opening night. It depended on repeated games, played under an agreed format, that gave spectators reason to return and new stakes to recognize. Ten matchups completed the first round robin. Each was played at the Palestra.

By February 22, with one matchup left in the round robin, Saint Joseph’s and Temple met with the City Series title at stake. A Saint Joseph’s retrospective describes Temple as a nationally ranked favorite. The Hawks’ victory gave the title race a decisive finish before its biggest crowd. It also provided an early example of what the format could do well: bring a city competition to a title-clinching game that people could understand without needing to see the arrangement behind it. (archives.upenn.edu)

The temptation is to locate the birth of the Big 5’s lasting reputation in that packed house. The crowd and the title make the game an important early marker. Yet one full arena cannot by itself establish decades of tradition. The achievement of the first season was more fundamental. Five schools had carried a cooperative agreement through an entire schedule, and spectators had been able to follow the result to a clear conclusion on a court they all shared.

For years afterward, that court remained the series’ defining setting. According to the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Big 5 games stayed at the Palestra until 1986, when games shifted to campus gyms. Villanova withdrew from the round robin in 1991 and returned in 1999. The changes did not erase the earlier seasons, but they showed that the form people remembered was a choice, not an unchangeable rule. (philadelphiaencyclopedia.org)

The point has become easier to see in recent years. In 2023, the men’s Big 5 added Drexel and replaced the traditional round robin with pod games and a championship tripleheader at the Wells Fargo Center. A competition long associated with five schools and one arena adopted a sixth member and a different route to its title. Those decisions belonged to a different era, with different circumstances. They also echoed a fact from the beginning: the series was organized, not discovered. (drexeldragons.com)

That is why the work at the Palestra belongs in the Big 5’s founding story. The seating, rooms, backboards, and ventilation were not merely background improvements to a famous gym. Nor was the May 1954 proposal just an administrative preface to the games that followed. Together, the building plan and the schedule addressed a concrete problem: how to make one arena serve a wider basketball community, and how to give five competing schools a reason to use it together.

The first night offered no guarantee that the plan would endure. A few thousand people saw Saint Joseph’s beat Villanova; by season’s end, many more saw the Hawks finish the job against Temple. In between, the Big 5 became something spectators could follow rather than merely an agreement officials had announced. The rivalry supplied the games. The shared schedule and renovated court gave them a home—and, over time, a history.