One Last Sling For David? Indiana Looks At Adding Size Divisions To Tourney

As the Alexandria-Monroe Tigers practiced for their final home game on a recent Saturday night, their teenaged faces pink and glistening under buzz cuts, only their high-tech leather high-tops that squeaked on the glossy gym floor gave away that this was 1996.

High school basketball in Indiana can seem timeless. It is the stuff of legend, the grist for books and movies, the phenomenon that gives identity to so many tiny farm towns. Thousands of fans attend basketball games on Friday and Saturday nights as religiously as they do for church on Sunday mornings.

But times change.

The heart of Hoosier Hysteria has always been the potential for small schools like Alexandria - student body, 571 - to knock off powerhouses three times their size. When Milan - student body, 121 - won the state championship in 1954, its team members became national celebrities and the story inspired the 1987 movie “Hoosiers.”

Such a giant-killing hasn’t happened since then, and now Indiana faces a proposal to start ranking schools by size, to give every school a chance at a championship within its class, to eliminate the bigger guys from the smaller gyms.

Hoosiers can talk of little else. The arguments have spread from coffee shops, taverns and barbershops onto the front pages and the evening news. Even the state legislature has considered weighing in.

The controversy has grown beyond a debate over an unwillingness to give up tradition for things much larger: the chance to dream, the value of winning - and losing - and the shortchanging of the state’s youth.

“I think our society is trying to have more winners, and in the attempt to have more winners, we’re diluting the prize,” said Alexandria’s coach, Garth Cone. “We’ve lost more than we’ve won. But I don’t like people telling us we can’t compete.”

Things aren’t the way they used to be, though, said Blake Ress, assistant commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association: “The reality is David isn’t beating Goliath, and the Goliaths are enjoying this and the Davids aren’t having a lot of fun.”

On April 29, the association will vote on dividing the schools into classes - something that is already the case in all but a handful of states. The vote is expected to be close, and nobody is willing to predict an outcome. Proponents note that football has always been divided by school size, but football might as well be cricket to the people of this basketball state.

The largest high school gym in the world, with 9,325 seats, is in New Castle, east of Indianapolis. So is the $3 million Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame Museum for high schoolers. Eight more of the 10 largest high school gyms in the world are in the state. The championships have been televised statewide for years, and recently ESPN began televising them nationally. In 1990, the final game set a national record for a high school sporting event when 41,046 fans crowded into the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis.

Basketball indoctrination begins at an early age. Driving the two-lane county roads that lay a plaid across the Hoosier flatlands, there’s no missing the backboards and hoops nailed onto barns or hanging over garage doors. It isn’t unusual for youngsters to learn how to dribble before they learn how to ride a bike.

“Ask people (in Indiana) who won the state championship two years ago, and they’ll know. But ask them who won the NCAA championship two years ago, and they probably won’t remember,” said retired UCLA coaching legend John Wooden, who has done both.

He played guard on the 1927 state championship team in Martinsville and doesn’t like the proposed change: “There’s too much emphasis placed on winning championships and not enough on the joys of playing.”

Indiana is a different place from when Wooden played here. A lot of high schools have consolidated into bigger districts and made it harder for the smaller schools to compete. About 70 percent of Indiana high schools have student bodies smaller than 900.

They rarely win.

Jim Feist, principal of the 460-student high school in Pekin, is among those leading the fight for change.

“There’s a lot more big schools today than there were 40 years ago. The chances of a small school winning today are virtually nil,” he said. The change, he said, “makes more people successful, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Bobby Plump does. He’s the guy who sank the winning basket with three seconds on the clock to give Milan its 32-30 edge over Muncie Central - a school 15 times larger - back in 1954.

“In today’s society, there’re a lot of people living through their children, and if their children aren’t winning then (they think) there’s something wrong with them. And that’s wrong,” he said. “Athletics, if it’s done correctly, mirrors life. Nobody, I don’t care who they are, has won at everything they’ve done.”

These days Plump is an insurance executive and owner of Plump’s Last Shot, a memorabilia-packed restaurant and bar he runs with his son in Indianapolis. He is the biggest opponent of the change and has begun Friends of Hoosier Hysteria to lobby against the proposal, which he thinks is so important that voters should have a statewide referendum to decide.

While the adults have been arguing about the changes, the Alexandria Tigers have been relentlessly drilling on jump shots and free throws. They made it as far as the Sweet Sixteen last year - the semifinals - and this year are ranked seventh. They are the smallest school considered to have a chance at winning the state championship March 23.

Last year, 3,000 of the 5,000 folks who live in Alexandria attended their regional tournament. The sign at the town limits said, “Last one out, turn off the lights.”

After they won, team members rode a fire truck heading a parade that stretched for 2 miles - and the state championship hadn’t even been played.

The players have endeared themselves to the town in places beyond the basketball court. The team sings Christmas carols at the local nursing home and signs get-well cards for sick folks. Team members sometimes read stories to youngsters at the elementary school and sponsor a program that allows children who read books to earn team T-shirts or a chance to sit on the bench during the game. Last year, elementary- and middle-school students read 10,000 books.

To a player, the Tigers don’t want the change.

“People in this town work hard, and I think they know we work hard out here,” said junior guard Travis Daugherty, panting during a break from practice.

The proposal, he said, “disappoints me because it ruins what Indiana basketball has always been about. It disappoints me we’ll never have a ‘Hoosiers’ again, that chance that a little school can knock off a big school. That’s what makes Indiana basketball what it is.”