In an idyllic world, Indiana could restore its fabled single-class high school basketball state tournament, and thousands of fans would pour into gymnasiums from Angola to Corydon in hopes of witnessing another “Milan Miracle” year after year after year.
Just as they did in the 1940s and ’50s.
But, like it or not, that genie can’t be put back into its bottle, as a proposed bill in the current session of the Indiana Legislature would seek to do. The Indiana High School Athletic Association board of directors uncorked that unique vessel in 1996, with a 12-5 vote to end the one-class tourney. The IHSAA member schools’ principals affirmed the board’s decision 220-157, allowing a new four-class system that eliminated the dramatic David-vs.-Goliath matchups in boys and girls hoops.
The change amounted to a foreclosure on the old Hoosier Hysteria, a March tradition that was once the envy of the other 49 states. State tournament attendance, which had declined since the ’50s heyday, dropped even more so after the four-class tournament began in 1998. Ticket sales at the girls state finals, for example, slid from 12,000 in 2010 at Fort Wayne to 8,000 last year in that northern Indiana town. Thus, the site of that event will shift this season to Terre Haute, a more centrally located city. Three years ago, IHSAA moved its girls state finals outside of Indianapolis for the first time since the female tournament began in 1976 because of scheduling conflicts at the possible venues.
The IHSAA tourney once was the top priority.
Still, while the dismantling of the single-class tournament erased nostalgic appeal, it also gave students at smaller schools a more realistic chance to enjoy long runs in a postseason playoff. The casual fans may no longer attend, but schools such as North Vermillion, Triton, Shenandoah, Rossville, Jac-Cen-Del and Oregon-Davis enjoyed state championships. Before the change, Milan accounted for the last little-guy victory way back in 1954.
The current four-class scheme is far from perfect. Private schools, with no enrollment boundaries, tend to dominate the smaller classes. The matchups in regionals and semistates sometimes are geographically illogical, with bizarre driving distances involved. Still, there is little support inside the IHSAA membership to revert to the abandoned one-size-fits-all tourney. A majority of the schools favor playing schools of similar enrollments.
That’s just the way it is, now.
Given that reality, Indiana lawmakers have no business meddling in high school basketball policies. A state senator from Oldenburg, Jean Leising, has prepared a bill that would prohibit schools from participating in an IHSAA tournament that is anything other than single-class in format. The Legislature’s track record of intervening in prep hoops is not good. Under pressure from the General Assembly, the IHSAA conducted a Tournament of Champions in the first two years of the class tourney, pitting the four divisional champs in a post-postseason playoff that became a poorly attended afterthought. The T of C was wisely scrapped.
The ideal 21st-century remedy already exists in Terre Haute. For the past 12 years, the Pizza Hut Wabash Valley Classic has recaptured the energy and drama of the former boys state tourney during the Christmas-New Year’s break. Local small schools take on the big guys from Terre Haute, and seats are hard to find in the key duels. Coming at midseason, the Classic allows teams such as Sullivan and Rockville to test their mettle against rivals three or four times their enrollment size, while still looking forward to a state title chase in March.
The Classic represents the perfect way for some to fulfill a yearning for the past. The PHWVC, it could be argued, has become the success that it is, in part, because of class basketball. It validates the purists’ sentimentality, and allows them to remind the IHSAA and the rest of the world that Indiana’s one-class tourney was once a gem.
The Pizza Hut Classic needed no state law to organize, grow and thrive. Likewise, the Legislature should let the IHSAA schools craft and conduct their own state championships.
Editorials
EDITORIAL: Lawmakers should leave IHSAA, high school basketball alone
Single-class tourney proposal misses mark
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