Who killed Hoosier Hysteria? Nobody. It’s alive and well
The first time I attended the IHSAA boys basketball State Finals, I was a senior in high school, with my end-zone seat at the Hoosier Dome getting ready to enjoy the Ben Davis-Jeffersonville championship game.
Nearly 400 teams had played down to this one game, which a Jeffersonville team led by Sherron Wilkerson and Brien Hanley would win 66–61 over Ben Davis. I was proud to be one of the 23,021 to witness it, as throughout my growing-up years, tickets to the boys basketball State Finals were nearly impossible to obtain. You had to be connected with one of the IHSAA’s schools to get part of their small allotment (which is how I got this ticket, as a manager for the Pike Red Devils) or one of the four participating teams. The move to the Dome in 1990 was to allow the general public to attend, and 41,046 crammed into the building to watch Damon Bailey and Bedford North Lawrence win the title.
The IHSAA boys basketball tournament dominated the state the entire month of March as you followed the local schools in the sectional, then the 64 survivors to the regional, and eventually to the four State Finalists.
But there was one image that stuck out. That day, Indiana was playing Kansas in the NCAA’s Elite Eight, with IU eventually falling short of a second straight Final Four. A photographer snapped a photo of the Jeffersonville players stopped, watching the game on the Hoosier Dome’s Jumbotron as they took the court for warmups.
That image has stuck in my head, especially recently.
Across Indiana, it’s sectional week, the annual hardwood town hall that brings together six-to-eight neighbors — and often rivals — in the state tournament’s first round. Local bragging rights are at stake. The sectional tournaments are more spread out now than they once were, part of the IHSAA’s decision to go to a four-class tournament in 1997.
Over the quarter-century since the move to four enrollment classes, Hoosiers everywhere have been subjected to thinkpieces, usually with some version of “what killed Hoosier Hysteria.” Friends from our parents and grandparents’ generation, from places like Muncie and Marion and Kokomo, look at smaller crowds today and blame everything on “class basketball,” as if Muncie Central’s playing Anderson instead of Cowan in the first round of the tournament has singlehandedly caused fans to turn away. If I’d have told you 50 years ago Anderson and Muncie Central would be meeting in the sectional, you wouldn’t believe me if I’d have told you there would be plenty of tickets at the door.
Part of being an economist is seeing the unseen, trying to peel back the onion, because the obvious answer is not often the right answer.
Looking at high school hoops today — the crowds are big, but not what they were in the tourney’s heyday in the 1960s, or even the 1980s. The interest is still intense, but not as broad as it once was. There aren’t ticket lotteries to raffle off the 9,000 seats at the Anderson Wigwam. In fact, you can walk up and buy tickets to almost any sectional game at tipoff — including when Anderson plays Muncie Central in a 4,000-seat gymnasium. The Wigwam itself has been shuttered for a decade, with the Anderson Indians having moved to a gym less than half its size a couple miles down the road. The semistates are now played at high school gyms rather than at Butler, Purdue, Notre Dame and Indiana State.
But the passion is still there among the players and teams. On Saturday night, 64 teams will cut down the nets as they have for more than a century and prepare for the regional, while more than 300 will have put away their uniforms and started preparing for baseball and track seasons. As a former coach, the preparation was always the same. Once the game started, the butterflies and feeling of this being an EVENT were always there. For the competitors, nothing has really changed other than some of the venues and some of the opponents. The ultimate goal is to climb the ladder in Indy the last weekend of March.
But my thoughts go back to that photo of the Jeffersonville Red Devils, on the biggest stage of their lives and getting ready to play in front of one of the largest crowds ever to see a high school game in America, watching IU on a big screen. Most of the fans were, too — the intense interest in that game was why the Hoosier Dome staff decided to display it on the Jumbotron, at least until it was time for the title game to start.
It was a passing of the torch.
College basketball had become king, especially once the NCAA Tournament began. While fans retained interest in their local high school teams, that interest went away as soon as they was eliminated from the tourney. The interest had shifted to following the college teams. Prior to the 1980s, fans would watch IU and Purdue on WTTV on Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons and then follow their respective high school teams on Friday and Saturday nights. The NCAA tournament wouldn’t become a major television event until the late 1980s, and ESPN was just beginning to find its way into households, bringing college hoops every night. The NBA had gone from a league whose finals were televised on tape delay in the late 1970s to must-see TV by the 1980s. By 1990, a generation had grown up watching college and pro hoops on TV. Those levels were beginning to crowd the high school games off the front pages of the newspapers. Once the NCAA tourney tipped off — or even the conference tourneys leading up to it — it diverted interest from the high school game. The fandom had gone from general to local.
Where there was statewide interest, it was in watching top IU and Purdue recruits — 41,000 to see Damon Bailey in 1990, 32,000 to watch Alan Henderson, Glenn Robinson and Brian Evans the following year, 23,000 to see Sherron Wilkerson and Jeffersonville in 1993. By 1995, when there weren’t any headline recruits playing in the game, the crowd for the title game was estimated at about 16,000. This was before the class tournament began.
At the same time, demographic changes were taking place. Philip Hoose’s incredible book “Hoosiers, the Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana,” penned in 1986, opens with a chapter on Anderson and the craziness the town had for basketball. It was pointed out that, when Anderson, Highland and Madison Heights were all at home on a Friday night, around 16,000 people were attending basketball games in the city. But in noting how Anderson High season tickets were like Indy 500 tickets, where your seats improved only if those ahead of you moved away or passed away, the AD was quoted as saying “half of (the season ticketholders) are in their 70s.” They grew up in a town where generations worked for General Motors. Their children graduated from Anderson High or one of the other two schools in town, got a factory job, settled down and raised their kids there. Multiple generations bonded around building car parts during the day and watching the Indians, Scots and Pirates on winter weekend nights.
Many of those who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s came of age in an era of newfound postwar affluence, where Friday nights meant “going out,” and the place to go out was the local basketball game. It was a place where you forged and strengthened connections, building community bonds that lasted generations. There weren’t a whole lot of distractions — there were three TV channels, the Pacers wouldn’t exist until 1967, there was no Internet, and the game was a place to find community.
But changes in the auto industry saw many of those factories close, the jobs drying up. GM shuttered many of its Anderson plants. Chrysler pulled out of New Castle. The Ball factory closed in Muncie. Marion, Kokomo, Connersville, the big county-seat towns that had breathed life into Hoosier Hysteria, where the basketball game was the see-and-be-seen event every Friday night in a thriving community, had hit hard times. The next generations didn’t stay in town and hire on at the factory, since the factory wasn’t there. They went to college and settled in Carmel, Westfield, Fishers, Zionsville and towns surrounding Indianapolis. Even if they stayed in their communities, they found themselves moving out of the city and sending their children to Pendleton Heights or Oak Hill or Delta.
In Anderson and Muncie, three high schools became one over a quarter-century. In Kokomo, one school became two in 1968, and then back to one in 1984. Many other towns saw steep enrollment declines. Marion and Connersville each lost 28 percent of their populations from 1970–2010. Anderson’s declined by 22 percent, Richmond by 20, New Castle by 19. Muncie, buoyed by Ball State, lost 15 percent of its population from its height in 1980. Many of the “Hoosier Hysteria standard-bearer” communities simply dried up.
The older generations still went to the high school games, but their kids and grandkids were no longer in Anderson and Muncie and Marion, so as they passed on, there was nobody filling their seats. Their connections were with the schools their kids were going to, and often, those connections aren’t formed as deeply. And it’s harder to form that connection when you can watch three or four college and pro games on television every night. Meanwhile, the balance of power shifted, from the schools of the North Central Conference to the ones around Indianapolis. Indy-area schools have won 17 of the 24 Class 4A titles since the tournament was split (and two of the last three single-class titles) and have been runner-up seven times. Five times in the last nine tournaments, both 4A state finalists have come from the Indianapolis area.
Some communities — especially in far northern and deep southwestern Indiana, where there’s been less out-migration — still fill the gyms on Friday nights. A lot of rural communities do, too, but they get overshadowed because their populations, and thus their fanbases, are smaller.
As population shifts to suburbia and families move into communities where they have to form new bonds and new loyalties while severing ties with their towns of origin, interest in high school basketball becomes very localized. Add to that, in urban and suburban areas, the high school can get swallowed up by a number of other events going on. There are now a lot of “see-and-be-seen” events and places to go on a winter Friday night. And everywhere, there are a lot more activities. The IHSAA sponsors 20 varsity sports and two emerging sports, stretching the interest of parents and athletes among many different activities. No longer is boys basketball seen as the activity in a school, but an activity, one that shares the spotlight in the school community with the band, choir and a dozen other athletic teams. Meanwhile, the Internet has provided a place for community bonds to form as well as volumes of on-demand entertainment.
No, the tournament isn’t going to draw 1.5 million fans (as it did in 1963, the year attendance peaked). It had been on a steady decline to 786,582 in 1996, the last year before the decision was made to go to classes. But even with that, Hoosier Hysteria is alive and well. Some of the nation’s largest gyms will be featuring large crowds this week, with rivals — some old arch-rivals, some new tourney combatants — battling to save their seasons in front of passionate audiences.
With the tourney divided by enrollment, some local rivalries and David-and-Goliath matchups may have been replaced, but what has replaced them are dynamite matchups among great, often evenly-matched teams. That creates a sense of unpredictability in each field, rather than the sense of inevitability that Lafayette Jeff or Kokomo or Marion would win the sectional each year. It creates variety at the regional round, rather than the same predictable set of teams. And between the lines, the basketball is as good as it has ever been. It’s still difficult to win a state championship and still a major accomplishment. That doesn’t change because there are three other schools who can claim to be kings of Indiana. In some ways, especially in 4A, it’s more difficult to win the championship now than it ever has been, because there’s a quality opponent in front of you every single night.
I’m a traditionalist. I loved the single-class tournament. But it’s time to put that in the rear-view mirror. It’s time to stop dwelling on the past, or blaming a second or third-order effect because things aren’t “the way they used to be.” Most of us who love high school basketball have come to love and embrace the IHSAA tournament for what it is, rather than pine for what it was.
Note: This was updated in January 2023 to reflect the number of state champions from the Indianapolis era since class basketball began.
