Indiana HS Basketball Tourney running thread...

I was hoping Shawn Kemp's team would impregnate him.

 

Thirded. Class basketball ripped up what was once a great thing in high school sports lore. But it's over.

Kinda reminds me of the outcry in Indiana over Daylight Savings Time. I've never understood the anger on either side of the issues. Move your clocks twice a year and get on with your life.

I loved the Indiana tournament when it was all inclusive. Yes, class basketball personifies the wussification of our society, but it is here to stay.

 

Class basketball sucks, but it's not the only reason why tournament attendance and interest have fallen off the cliff in the last 10 years. It's a combination of several factors ...

*-Poorly-conceived 4-class system when 2 or 3 would've given everyone what they wanted and worked much better.
*-Because of said poorly-conceived system, traditional rivals (even if they're of similar size) are split up at sectional time and therefore teams are traveling an hour to play 6 p.m. Tuesday games against schools they have no familiarity with. A lot of fans said "screw it" then and quit going. It's not a surprise that the area of the state that classes have screwed with the sectionals the least (Class A & 3A in southwest Indiana) have seen no dropoff in tournament attendance from the "glory days."
*-Suburban flight -- the housing boom and the auto industry collapse have had two effects. Those cities where there had been "traditional" powers -- Muncie, Marion, Anderson, Richmond, Connersville, Kokomo ... even Indy ... were gutted by both. A lot of people who graduated from Muncie Central now send their kids to Delta or Yorktown. A lot of the Anderson folks who would've bled red-and-green a generation ago now live in Pendleton and Lapel. They don't really have any connection to MC or Anderson anymore, and they don't really have much loyalty to their home school, and they have no freaking clue where they're playing in the sectional this year, so they don't follow anyone. The fact that most of those towns were factory towns that were based on the auto industry, and the Big Three collapsing over the last decade killed those towns, blighted the real estate, and caused some massive demographic shifts (and problems). The result has been pretty earth-shattering. As noted before, the places where attendance & interest have never really dropped off are more rural communities (like Vincennes/Washington/Jasper and their surrounding schools).
*-Let's not forget the elephant in the room. The emergence of ESPN has centralized the attention on national sports. Its development into a behemoth coincides with the era the tournament really began to slip -- the early-to-mid 1990s. That's about the time the NCAA Tournament really began to turn into a 3-week-long Super Bowl, sucking the air out of the room for everyone else. In Indiana, that included the high school tournament. Given IU and Purdue were both national powers at the time (IU was in the midst of an 8-year run that included a national title, another Final Four appearance, a third Elite Eight spot and five Sweet Sixteens; Purdue won three straight Big Ten titles in the mid-1990s, went to the Elite Eight twice in the 1990s and both rosters were full of Indiana kids throughout much of the decade). That caused a slip in attendance, and the class basketball people spun it into a trend that necessitated a change in the tournament.
*-The statewide TV network led by the big Independent station out of Indy (Channel 4 -- the same channel that showed IU & Purdue) lost the tournament rights to an upstart station in the mid-1990s (one that did not build a network with as much reach). After the class tournament started, they sued out of the contract and a religious station out of Indy/South Bend picked the tournament up, putting the tournament in fewer homes (and in a very out-of-the-way dial position ... this is the small-scale equivalent of dropping ESPN for Versus). Now, the IHSAA foolishly dumped said religious station for a consortium of cable providers who put the State Finals on obscure higher-tier digital channels. The tournament became "out of sight, out of mind," and only the diehards care.

Once the train left the barn, it wasn't going back.

Indiana HS basketball lost a lot of fans with the consolidations of the 1960s, but survived. It lost a lot with class basketball, but the tournament survives (and although I'm not a fan of it, it's got some good points, and I still enjoy it).

A lot of people like to complain, and class basketball gave them an excuse to do so. But blaming "class basketball" like a lot of folks do is somewhat short-sighted. They don't look at the other demographic factors and trends that contributed to the decline -- and that would've happened with or without class.

 

7-foot black guys like Eric Montross and Stephen Van Treese ... yeah .

The flip side of the class basketball diehards who are still living in 1954 are the small-school cacklers -- the people from the tiny communities that b*tched for years and finally got their wish.

If I had a buck for every time some small-school diehard cracked some line about the "big Indianapolis schools that can't just beat up the little schools anymore," I'd be rich. One thing that's been a factor is that the class tournament has *helped* the Indianapolis schools. It used to be the 26 Marion County schools fed into the same regional, and the survivor would still have to win 4 games to win the tournament. Now, the Indianapolis regional hasn't really changed -- it's pretty much the same schools it was before class. But now, the Indy regional winner only has to win 2 games to win the title. The results? Pike has won 3 (in 4 trips to the title game), Lawrence North has won 3, North Central has won 1 (in 2 trips). Indy teams tend to have smaller, more transient fan bases, too, so that tends to lead to the perception of a decline, when in reality, it's just that different teams are going to Conseco now.

So, the cacklers love watching "the big schools beat up on each other early" and pat themselves on the back as to how they ended their gravy train, but in the same breath, complain about all of those big-city (translation: "black") teams from Indianapolis that keep hogging all the attention.

 

Thomas needs 881 points to surpass Bailey. He's 11th all time and needs 378 to become third all-time.

He scored 666 as a freshman (23 games), 771 as a sophomore (27 games) and 817 as a junior (26 games).

And since I'm a yung'un, I really don't care about single class basketball. I like the four-class setting. Get over it is what I tell all these people stuck in the 1950s.

 

When my friend and I did a state gym tour for a freelance story, we asked different coaches and ADs why basketball was in decline. One popular response: "girls' sports."

Yeah, that response had more than a whiff of rank sexism. But the issue underneath was that people now had other things to do. Heck, you can add TV, video games, minor sports, club sports, violin lessons, the Internet, homemade porn, whatever, to the list. I think in the main people still care about the sport of basketball, and high school basketball, in Indiana more intensely than in many other states. But the days of towns filling the gym every night are long, long past. I remember reading a long time back (I wish I could remember the source) that full tournament attendance, from sectional onward, peaked in the early 1960s, when school consolidation had already begun, but before it swallowed every rural school into a directional like North-Northwest County or Tri-Lateral.

I wouldn't call Indiana a football state. Believe me, once the Pacers and, most of all, IU, get good again, you'll see the fans back and just as intense. You just can't support gargantuan gyms anymore because communities aren't as engaged, and that was happening even before class basketball.

 

Whoever it was earlier in this thread (too lazy to look it up at the moment) that mentioned class basketball being an easy sports radio topic, I kind of smirked. I thought, "it's been a long, long time since I heard that one debated all that much on radio". Then, in my car just about an hour ago, I heard Dan Dakich inviting in caller after caller to talk about class basketball and how bad it is.

I give up. I swear to God I'd move out of this state in a second, only to come back on state finals weekend, for the next 50 years. Then, maybe then, this debate will be done.

 

Stuck in the '50s? Try mid-'90s. At least for me. I know many of us who were in high school at the tail-end of the one-class era are just as fond of it as our elders. I may not be young anymore, but I ain't that old, either. And I'd give my eyeteeth to see it go back.

Why? Because I hate the idea that something that was so much fun, so special to me as a kid is gone, that kids too young to remember it won't get to experience that.

Maybe class basketball is an adequate substitute, I don't know. I haven't been since '97 (primarily because I moved out of state for college that year and haven't moved back). But it's hard for me to imagine that it is.

I know when I've been to and covered high school games and state championships in other places (Maryland, Virginia and N.C.) I've seen some good basketball and nothing that approaches the community or fan experience that I remember from the mid '90s in Indiana.

This is the first time in my life I've complained about multi-class basketball to anyone other than close friends from my childhood in Indiana. I guess it just makes me mad to hear people saying I need to "get over" my belief that the single-class tourney was something special and that it's a shame it's gone.

I'm sure some folks back home are over-the-top in their boisterousness about bringing one-class basketball back. But I don't think it's fair to tar those of us who'd still like to hold on to a shred of hope that, maybe, somehow that great experience from our own childhoods could be recreated for kids today.

 

Boy, there's a guy who flamed out.

 

I heard Dakich filling in on the Score in Chicago this morning. Strange for many reasons, but especially because Dakich is on an ESPN station in Indianapolis, and appeared on the non-ESPN sports station in Chicago.

You can't underestimate that class basketball was coming apart at the same time the CART-IRL was in its earliest of stages, and the Indy 500 looked like it would be filled with the likes of the Racing Dentist for the rest of its time. The two major sports associated with the state, and both go kablooey at the same time.