Hoosier Hysteria is the state of excitement surrounding basketball in Indiana, or more specifically the Indiana high school basketball tournament. In part, the excitement stemmed from the inclusion of all tournament entrants into the same tournament, where a small town's David might knock off a large city's Goliath. The most famous example occurred in 1954, when Milan defeated Muncie Central to win the State title. The plot of the now famous movie, Hoosiers, was based on the story of the 1954 Milan team and seems to typify the hysteria related to basketball in the state of Indiana.
Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, formerly named and still commonly referred to as Assembly Hall, is a 17,222-seat arena on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the home of the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball and women's basketball teams. It opened in 1971, replacing the current Gladstein Fieldhouse. The court is named after Branch McCracken, the men's basketball coach who led the school to its first two NCAA National Championships in 1940 and 1953. Basketball sportscaster Gus Johnson calls the Assembly Hall "the Carnegie Hall of college basketball."
The Porter County Conference (PCC) is an athletic conference made up of eight Indiana high schools. Five of the eight schools are within Porter County, Indiana. Of the remaining schools, the three remaining are in LaPorte County.
Hinkle Fieldhouse is a basketball arena on the campus of Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. Completed in early 1928, it was the largest basketball arena in the United States until 1950. The facility was renamed Hinkle Fieldhouse in 1966 in honor of Butler's longtime coach and athletic director, Paul D. "Tony" Hinkle. It is the sixth-oldest college basketball arena still in use, as well as the oldest and among the largest basketball arenas in NCAA's Division I basketball, although its initial seating capacity of more than 15,000 has been reduced to 9,100. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1987, Hinkle Fieldhouse is sometimes referred to as "Indiana's Basketball Cathedral."
The Harry Gladstein Fieldhouse, also known as the New Fieldhouse, is an indoor track and field complex on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. From 1960 to 1971 it also served as the home of the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team.
Conference Indiana (CI) is an athletic conference within the Indiana High School Athletic Association. Conference Indiana was initially formed from the union of surviving members of the Central Suburban Athletic Conference (CSAC) and the South Central Conference (SCC) after the departure of members to the Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference (MIC).
The Pocket Athletic Conference (PAC) is a high school athletic conference in Southwestern Indiana with its headquarters at Forest Park. Most of the conference's 13 members are mainly Class 2A and 3A public high schools currently located in Daviess, Dubois, Gibson, Perry, Pike, Posey, Spencer, and Warrick counties. Only one, Tecumseh, is a 1A and as such operates its football program independently of the PAC and remains independent in the sport, playing schools much closer to its size than its much larger borderline 3A or 3A and 4A fellow members.
The Southern Indiana Athletic Conference (SIAC) is a high school athletic conference based in Evansville, Indiana. Five of the conferences eight schools; Bosse, Central, Harrison, North, and Reitz; comprise the public Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation. Mater Dei and Memorial are private Catholic high schools ran by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Evansville and Vincennes, and the largest member is Castle, a public school located in neighboring Newburgh in Warrick County under the Warrick County School Corporation. The league was founded in 1936, and at one point stretched far across South and West Indiana: from Mount Vernon in the west to New Albany in the east, and from Evansville in the south to Terre Haute in the north. Jasper and Vincennes Lincoln announced in May 2019 that they will leave the disbanding Big Eight Conference to rejoin the Southern Indiana Athletic Conference beginning with the 2020-21 season.
Better known for its high school basketball, Indiana high school football has also been a staple of Hoosier weekends for more than 100 years. In 1930, more than 30,000 people jammed Notre Dame Stadium to watch Mishawaka beat undefeated South Bend Central, 6-0. At the time, it was one of the largest crowds to witness a high school football game in the United States. Indiana high school football is still immensely popular, with tens of thousands now packing Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis to watch six state championship games over two days in November. The following is a history of Indiana's big school state football championship.
Washington High School is a public high school in South Bend, Indiana, United States. It is part of the SBCSC magnet program, where it is the Medical/Allied Health Magnet strain.
The 1954 Milan High School Indians won the Indiana High School Boys Basketball Tournament championship in 1954. With an enrollment of only 161, Milan was the smallest school ever to win a single-class state basketball title in Indiana, beating the team from the much larger Muncie Central High School in a classic competition known as the Milan Miracle. The team and town are the inspiration for the 1986 film Hoosiers. The team finished its regular season 19–2 and sported a 28–2 overall record.
The Duneland Athletic Conference (DAC) is a high school athletic conference in Indiana serving eight members of the Indiana High School Athletic Association. Member schools are located in the counties of Lake, LaPorte, and Porter along Indiana's Lake Michigan shore. Each school is classified based on enrollment as 6A or 5A for football and 4A for basketball, the classes for the largest schools in Indiana. The Duneland Conference is also known for its gymnastics programs which have won a combined total of 35 state championship and state runner-up titles.
The Ohio River Valley Conference is an Indiana High School Athletic Association-sanctioned conference located in Jefferson, Ohio, Ripley, and Switzerland counties. Formed in 1952, the conference has been fairly stable throughout its history, as five of the current seven members are original members.
The Eastern Indiana Athletic Conference (EIAC) is a distinguished, eight-member IHSAA-sanctioned high school athletic conference. Current members consist of Batesville, Connersville, East Central, Franklin County, Greensburg, Lawrenceburg, Rushville, and South Dearborn. All eight member schools are located in rural southeast Indiana, spread across Dearborn, Decatur, Fayette, Franklin, Ripley, and Rush counties. The EIAC was founded in 1956 when Brookville, Cambridge City, and Hagerstown of the East Central Conference joined with Aurora, Batesville, and Lawrenceburg of the Southeastern Indiana Conference. Batesville and Lawrenceburg are the only two of the original six founding schools that haven't consolidated or left the conference. North Dearborn joined the conference in 1962, which eventually consolidated into East Central in 1973. In 1974, Greensburg parted ways with the South Central Conference to join the EIAC. Aurora consolidated into South Dearborn in 1978 and Brookville consolidated into Franklin County in 1989. With the exception of 1962-66, 1973-74, 1977-85, and 1974-77, the conference had been a six-member league until 2013 when Connersville and Rushville joined.
The North Central Conference is an IHSAA-sanctioned athletic conference consisting of ten large high schools in Cass, Delaware, Grant, Howard, Madison, Marion, Tippecanoe, and Wayne Counties across Central and North Central Indiana. Most of these schools are in 35,000+ population towns like Anderson, Marion, Kokomo, Lafayette, Muncie, and Richmond. Several of the nation's largest gymnasiums belong to members of this conference.
The Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) is the arbiter of interscholastic competition among public and private high schools in the U.S. state of Indiana. It monitors a system that divides athletically-competing high schools in Indiana based on the school's enrollment. The divisions, known as classes, are intended to foster fair competition among schools of similar sizes. A school ranked 3A is larger than a school ranked 1A, but not as large as a 6A-ranked school. Only football has 6 classes. Boys' basketball, girls' basketball, volleyball, baseball and softball are divided into four classes. Boys' and girls' soccer have featured three classes since the 2017–18 school year. All other sports compete in a single class.
The Indiana Hoosiers women's basketball team is the intercollegiate women's basketball program representing Indiana University Bloomington. The school competes in the Big Ten Conference in NCAA Division I. The Hoosiers play home basketball games at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall on the university campus in Bloomington, Indiana.
The Central Suburban Conference was an IHSAA-sanctioned conference from 1971 to 1997. The conference can be considered a continuation of the Capital District Conference, as almost all of the schools involved in that conference during the 1970–71 school year became charter members of the CSC that next year. By the early 1990s, the conference had dwindled to five large schools located in suburban Indianapolis. As class basketball was set to be introduced in the 1997–98 school year, the Central Suburban and South Central conferences, as well as large independent schools, decided to reorganize, giving way to Conference Indiana and the Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference. The Central Suburban can be considered a predecessor to Conference Indiana, as all but one school became part of that conference.
South Putnam High School is a public high school located on the southern edge Greencastle, Indiana in the heart of Putnam County. South Putnam High School serves students in the south central Putnam County area. There is also one middle school, South Putnam Middle School and two elementary schools, Fillmore and Central, that feed into South Putnam High School. South Putnam High School was ranked, in 2018, as the #18 high school in Indiana by U.S. News & World Report, the highest ranking of any Indiana public high school with less than 400 students. South Putnam High School is a school in South Putnam Community Schools, which is crossed by Interstate 70, U.S. Route 40, and U.S. Route 231. With the relative access to many highways, South Putnam is located in the crossroads between the cities of Terre Haute, Bloomington, Lafayette/West Lafayette, and Indianapolis, four university cities that have many prominent programs in various fields of study, which makes South Putnam a center of activity located between these four cities.
