The Pilot News - Basketball author’s visit shines spotlight on Culver ‘glory days’

Twice in three seasons the Indians came within seven points of competing in the state championships and even advanced to the final eight twice during that period — not a bad record in light of the competition, which included more than 750 high school teams in Indiana at the time.
Culver, in fact, is one of just ten communities Houck chose to visit this year, in part to discuss his book, “Hoosiers All: Indiana High School Basketball Team Names, Glory Season, Boys and Girls, Past and Present, Large and Small” (Hawthorne Publishing, 2009). The book, for that matter, has Culver connections: its publisher, Hawthorne of Carmel, is headed up by Nancy Niblack Baxter, whose family roots on Lake Maxinkuckee go deep. Baxter has authored several books related to area history in addition to publishing last year’s “Adventures of Alexia: a Lake Maxinkuckee Girl 1885” by Marcia Adams.
As reported in previous editions of the Citizen, Houck hopes former players and fans of Culver basketball will show up on the 23rd and share memories as well as memorabilia (photos, posters, pennants, newspaper clippings, and more). The artifacts will become part of a scrapbook titled “The All-Time All-Star Hoosier High School Alumni Basketball Team” and will be donated to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, where it will be kept on permanent display.
Houck is well aware that the relationship between the terms “Hoosier” and “basketball” is much deeper than the team name of a specific university.
“I believe basketball helped knit Indiana together as a state,” says the Oak Park, Illinois-raised Houck. He feels basketball fever afflicts Indiana — where he moved in 1958 to work for Lilly — as well as his childhood state, Ohio, and Kentucky.
Though the sport came into being in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the first recorded basketball game took place in Indiana in 1894.
“People from all over (Indiana) convened at various places to play basketball. Transportation and communication were so bad then, this brought us together. I think the values learned on the basketball floor of perseverance, teamwork, grace…and performing under pressure are Indiana’s values. And basketball was well suited to a state like Indiana. Small towns might not have enough kids for a football or track team, but they always had enough for basketball. And you could spend hours alone shooting basketballs in your own back yard. I picture that of kids all over Indiana in the first 30 or 40 years of the state. I don’t think it’s just a cliché or stereotype.
“So many of those (early) schools are gone, and with them regrettably went a lot of community pride. When the railroad was gone, a lot of towns lost their reason for being…then the whole thing really became consolidated when legislature consolidated (Indiana schools) in the 1960s.”
Basketball changed in the Culver area during this period, of course, when teams from Monterey, Leiters Ford, and Ora lost their unique identities and melded with Culver to form, in 1968, the consolidated Culver Community High School (changing the team name locally from Indians to Cavaliers in the process).
In 1996, the shift from the traditional single-class system to a size-staggered system of sports competition in Indiana (mandated by the Indiana High School Athletic Association, which actually allowed each school to vote on the matter) changed high school basketball forever. Gone were the sorts of possibilities embodied in films like the popular movie “Hoosiers,” in which a rural small-town basketball team was able to fight its way to the top, defeating massive city teams to win the state championship. Today, high school teams compete against others drawing from populations of like size.
None of that, however, has erased the excitement of high school basketball across Indiana or in Culver, where history was made just last year as the Cavaliers battled their way to the sectional level.
For more information on Houck’s Culver Public Library appearance, call 574-842-2941.