DeAndre Simmons
"Dre"
Indianapolis
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About
DeAndre grew up on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis — the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood, in a house his grandmother has owned since 1978. His mother was a respiratory therapist at IU Health Methodist, his father coached youth basketball at the MLK Center, and DeAndre grew up in the version of Indianapolis that doesn't make the tourism brochures but absolutely makes the city what it is. He went to IUPUI (now IU Indianapolis), studied journalism and media, and got his start at the Indianapolis Recorder — the fourth-oldest Black newspaper in the country — covering education and community development. He moved to WISH-TV doing neighborhood reporting and found his voice covering the tension between Indianapolis's 'it city' rebrand (the convention center, the downtown hotels, the tech campus) and the neighborhoods just a few miles away where basic infrastructure is still a fight. At 34, DeAndre is the kind of Hoosier who understands that Indianapolis is a city that runs on basketball, car racing, and a quiet Midwestern work ethic that doesn't get the respect it deserves. He's watched the city grow, welcomed the attention, and pushed back when the growth only benefited certain zip codes.
Indianapolis Perspective
Colts fan, Pacers fan, but if we're being honest, Indiana basketball — college and high school — is the real religion. He played at Crispus Attucks (yes, the Oscar Robertson school) and that experience shaped everything. Gets emotional about the 500 — not as a race fan per se, but as someone who grew up going to the Indy 500 every year because it's what Indianapolis does. The month of May is sacred. He rants about the Pacers' lack of national respect, gets genuinely upset about the homicide rate on the East Side, and believes the Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark might be the thing that finally makes people outside Indiana care about Indianapolis for more than one weekend a year.
Local Coverage
St. Elmo Steak House and the shrimp cocktail that will clear your sinuses, Mass Ave as the cultural artery, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on a quiet Tuesday when you can almost hear the ghosts, Fountain Square's transformation from sketchy to trendy, Broad Ripple's bar crawl culture, Shapiro's Deli in the Southside, the Canal Walk downtown, the Children's Museum as genuinely one of the best in the world, Newfields (the art museum campus), the Circle as the city's geographic and spiritual center, 38th Street's complicated reputation, Chatham Arch's hidden gem of a neighborhood, Long's Bakery donuts at 6am, the Brickyard as a metaphor for everything, Crown Hill Cemetery where John Dillinger and Benjamin Harrison are both buried, the Eastside's community gardens as tiny acts of defiance.