Fishers High School's Joe Leonard is one of the Indianapolis area's most intense coaches on the sideline, yet even he can be distracted by Noblesville's raucous student section.

"They start chanting stuff like, 'Hot, juicy burgers,' " Leonard said. "Heck, I'm sitting on the bench thinking of Wendy's. It's just a tough place to play."

The statistics bear him out.

The Indianapolis Star analyzed the home-court advantages in the Hoosier Crossroads, Metropolitan Interscholastic and Mid-Hoosier conferences from 2007-08 to '10-11 and found that Noblesville led the way statistically in terms of outscoring its opponents at home compared to road games. Noblesville out-scored its opponents by 7.6 points more at home than on the road. That's nearly two points better than the next best team in the study and four more than the average.

The Millers (13-9) need that edge today when they host Class 4A No. 1 Hamilton Southeastern at 6 p.m. in the sectional semifinals.

While the gym is just 15 years old, the stands are closer to the floor than most modern gyms.

"It helps that we're right next to the court and we can almost touch the players," said Noblesville senior Erik Forbes, a regular in a student section that totals about 300 for most games. "We usually pick out a player who is being cocky or is their best player and we'll say something about their hair or things like that. We're just trying to give our team any advantage it can get."

There is some statistical and anecdotal evidence that home-court advantage has waned over the years as schools have built bigger, multipurpose gymnasiums that are similar. Few schools keep detailed game-by-game records from over the years; however, Beech Grove had a home-court advantage of 10.3 points in 1922 and from 1925-29, and six points from 1930-37. That edge dropped to three points in the 1990s, and 0.2 from 2000-01 to '10-11.

Lapel coach Jimmie Howell knows what an advantage an older gym can be. He played and coached in Lapel's old gym before a new school opened in the 2007-08 year. Howell said fan support is good, but the new gym doesn't have the edge of the old one.

"In the old gym, fans were down on top of you three or four feet from the sideline," said Howell, who had a similar experience when coaching at Brownsburg as it closed Varsity Gym and moved to a new facility in 2001. "Now they're 20 feet from the sideline."

Mark James, who is in his first year at Ben Davis after 26 seasons at Franklin Central, said the proximity of fans isn't the only thing that has changed.

"Twenty years ago, you would go in the gym and it would be packed and people would be screaming at you," James said. "The crowds were bigger, but they also were more vocal and more into it."

Fishers was rated as one of the easier places for opponents to play in The Star's study. Of course, one factor is that the school just opened in 2006. Leonard said it was hard to build a home-court edge at the start. Another reason, he said, is that football was king at the start. Leonard also felt his program might have needed to earn respect from fans and officials.

"I don't have qualms about the officiating at my place now," he said. "When you go on the road, you expect to get a few calls that are questionable (go against you). That's OK because you're on the road and you've got to fight through that. Teams came to our place and I still got the questionable calls (against my team). I could have been imagining that, but I don't feel that way now."

Chris Carr, a sports psychologist and coordinator for Sport and Performance Psychology for St. Vincent Sports Performance, said there is little research in terms of the psychological impact of home-court advantages. He pointed out, however, that all the courts have the same dimensions, so where a game is played doesn't have to have an impact on a game.

"It has everything to do with how well an athlete, a team and a coach manage their distractions," Carr said. "It can be a distraction if an athlete doesn't have a good focus strategy, good confidence or doesn't manage their butterflies."

But that can be a lot to ask of a teenager.

Noblesville coach Dave McCollough expects to have a huge crowd tonight and praised his student section's creativity, routines and new wrinkles. There is a contest each season to name the student section; this season's group is the Npire Strikes Back.

Daniel Purvlicis, a 6-7 senior for the Millers, said the fans fire up his team from the start.

"It keeps us in the game sometimes if they're getting loud, and we're down, we get a nice little boost there," Purvlicis said.

Noblesville junior Alysen Lemieux said mind games are essential to the fan section's success.

"We use any which way to get in their heads," she said. "It's usually whatever we can find out about a player when we ask them questions before the game. If they respond, it just gives us a reason to continue on that person."