Memorial Hall was built in the mid-1950s as a multipurpose gymnasium on the campus of Delaware State College. The name reflected a postwar tradition: campus buildings constructed in the decade after World War II were often dedicated to students and alumni who had served in the war. The hall has served as the full-time home court for DSU's NCAA Division I basketball teams since 1982. Before then, the building hosted general physical education classes, intramural sports, ROTC indoor drills, and the school's volleyball team. It has had a relatively stable architectural identity for nearly seventy years. The building is unremarkable from the outside - a low rectangular gymnasium structure clad in brick and the basic mid-century institutional vernacular - but inside, on a game night, with the pep band playing the Approaching Storm fight song and the cheerleaders hitting their stunt sequence, the place transforms. The hardwood floor was named Bayhealth Court in 2022 under a corporate sponsorship with the regional health system. Bleacher seats line all four sides. There are no chairback seats. The bench bleachers are exactly the kind every American student remembers from their high school gym.

In November 2024, Delaware State hosted the MEAC Volleyball Championship in Memorial Hall. The Lady Hornets, seeded third, faced top-seeded Howard University in the final. The match went to five sets - the maximum allowed in college volleyball - and the home team came back from behind to win the deciding fifth set 15-13. The crowd was, as one local reporter put it, as electric as the crowd in Memorial Hall Gymnasium has ever been. The win gave DSU its second MEAC volleyball championship in three seasons and an automatic NCAA tournament berth. The match also demonstrated what Memorial Hall does best: when the building is packed, the noise inside has nowhere to go. Sound bounces off the four bleacher walls, off the low ceiling, off the hardwood. Visiting players have to shout into their teammates' ears to communicate at timeouts. Coaches use hand signals. The arena's small footprint becomes a tactical weapon for the home team.

By the early 2020s, DSU leadership had decided that Memorial Hall, while beloved, no longer served the institution's growing athletic ambitions and student population. The arena is too small to host the entire student body at graduation, orientation, or large convocations. The locker rooms are dated. The concessions and restrooms struggle on big nights. In 2024, the university launched its Athletics Transformation initiative. By mid-2025 the Delaware state legislature had approved $20 million in initial funding toward a new indoor field house and convocation center on campus. Preliminary cost estimates for the full project run around $90 million. The new venue, if built as planned, would offer modern seating, dedicated locker rooms, training facilities, premium seating options, and amenities on par with peer Division I institutions. Athletic Director Tony Tucker has noted that Dover's central Delaware location means the new arena could host state high school championships and regional events that currently require families to drive to Wilmington or out of state. The 2024 Delaware high school football championship was held at DSU's Alumni Stadium. The hope is that the new arena would do the same for basketball and volleyball.

Until the new arena exists, Memorial Hall continues to host the Hornets. DSU has made periodic upgrades - new flooring, improved lighting, the Bayhealth partnership for athletic training services - but the core structure has not changed since the 1950s. The men's basketball team competes in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference under head coach Stan Waterman, with the Hornets fielding teams that have produced players like Tracy Bergan and Frantz Massenat. The women's basketball team competes in the same conference. The volleyball program, the recent MEAC champion, has produced two of the last three conference titles. The arena also hosts the annual Ballin' for Blood community blood drive in partnership with Bayhealth, career fairs, and indoor practice for the Approaching Storm Marching Band. During COVID-19, it was used for socially-distanced classroom space. The gym does more work than a 1,800-seat building should be asked to do.

Alumni and local media have called Memorial Hall, with varying degrees of affection, old, cramped, and out of date. One alumnus journalist wrote about the struggle to get to and from the bathroom during a packed game night and added that anything to replace Memorial Hall would be welcomed. The criticism is real. The capacity caps DSU's ticket revenue. The narrow concourse limits concessions sales. The bench bleachers do not compete with the chair-back stadium seating that has become standard at peer institutions. And yet: the building holds DSU's basketball history. Every championship banner, every retired jersey, every photograph of past Hornet teams hangs in the rafters of this 1950s gym. The new convocation center, when it comes, will be more comfortable and more profitable. It will not be Memorial Hall. The intimacy that comes from packing 1,800 students into a building where the home team can hear every word of the visiting bench will not transfer. Delaware State will gain a modern arena. It will lose a particular kind of noise that small gyms have specialized in for the entire history of college basketball. Both things will be true.