1954 Milan High School basketball team
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. Background. Unlike most states, Indiana held a single-class tournament  in which all schools competed for the same championship in one of America's largest and most popular high school tournaments, until the separation into enrollment classes in 1997. Indiana still possessed a large rural population well into the 1950s and rural school consolidation was still in its infancy. As a result, most Indiana high schools of the era had what today are considered extremely small enrollments. Many of these small schools had realistic expectations of advancing several rounds into the tournament in that era, but they would almost inevitably fall in the regionals to urban schools from places such  as South Bend, Evansville, Gary, Terre Haute, Muncie, Bloomington, Lafayette, Fort Wayne, Anderson and Indianapolis. Coach Marvin Wood had been hired two years earlier, at the age of 24, after a collegiate playing career at Butler University and a coaching stint in French Lick. His hiring was controversial, coming on the heels of Superintendent Willard Green's firing of coach Herman "Snort" Grinstead, who had ordered new uniforms without authorization. Wood's coaching style was the opposite of Grinstead's in many ways. He closed practice to outsiders, an act that removed one of the major forms of leisure time  entertainment for the town's basketball-crazed population and angered many. He was impressed by the unusual scope of size and talent available in such a small school among the many boys trying out for the team, talent forged by a strong junior-high program. He taught them more patience than the run-and-gun Grinstead, culminating in a four-corner ball control offense he called the "cat-and-mouse". Expectations were higher in the 1952–1953 season. These were realized as the Indians won their first regional game in school history under questionable circumstances against Morton Memorial, an orphanage school  outside of Knightstown. In that game, Morton Memorial held a nine-point lead late in the game, only to lose in double-overtime as Milan's fourth quarter comeback was aided when the timekeeper delayed restarting the clock by a few seconds on one occasion. Milan went on to shock the state by winning the 1953 regional title and sweeping the semi-state to advance to the final four, finally bowing out in a 56–37 semifinal blowout to the Bears of South Bend Central High School. The nucleus of that team returned for the 1953–54 season with expectations of tournament  success unprecedented for such a small school. The 1953–54 season. With four starters returning from the semifinalists, Milan was considered a lock to win both the Ripley County tournament and the sectional. To prepare for the rigors of tournament play, Milan scheduled several games against larger, more prestigious schools, including a tournament at Frankfort, where they would suffer their first loss of the season, a 49–47 nail-biter against the hosts. Milan cruised through the rest of the schedule before suffering a late-season upset to Aurora, who were also coming into a successful period in their basketball history. 1954  IHSAA Boys Basketball Tournament. Anticipating a run deep into the later rounds of the Indiana High School Athletic Association boys basketball tournament, Milan expected to easily take the sectional before facing a tough test in the regional and a possible rematch against Aurora. Sectional at Versailles. Milan 83, Cross Plains 36 Milan 57, Versailles 43 Milan 44, Osgood 32 Regional at Rushville. Milan 58, Rushville 34 Milan 46, Aurora 38 Semi-State at Butler Fieldhouse, Indianapolis. Milan 44, Montezuma 34 Milan 65, Indianapolis Crispus Attucks 52 State Finals at Butler Fieldhouse, Indianapolis. Milan 60, Terre Haute Gerstmeyer Tech 48 Milan  32, Muncie Central 30 The Indiana High School Athletic Association broke a longstanding tradition and awarded the Trester Award for mental attitude, sportsmanship, and character to a member of the winning team, Bobby Plump. Aftermath. 40,000 people descended on Milan (population: 1,150) the next day as the team returned home from Indianapolis, lining State Road 101 for to congratulate the Indians. As schools consolidated throughout Indiana, the days of small-town success gradually ended. Fewer than half of the 751 schools entered in the 1954 tournament exist today. With increased urbanization and suburbanization throughout the state, Indiana schools became much  larger and the urban schools that had the most success in the tournament increased their domination of the tournament. No school with an enrollment less than five times that of Milan's ever won the tournament again under the one-class system that was replaced with a multi-class tournament in 1997. The smallest school to win the state tournament after Milan was Plymouth in 1982, led by future NBA star and coach Scott Skiles. Milan's enrollment is now over twice as large as it was in 1954. Thirty-three years later, the film "Hoosiers," a fictionalized account based  on Milan's 1952–54 seasons, opened to positive reviews, renewing interest in the team and its legacy. The film combined game play from both the 1952–53 and 1953–54 seasons, merging the 1953 quarter-final opponent, the South Bend Bears, with the scoring pattern from the 1954 championship win against Muncie Central. The 2010 run of Butler—a university team that to this day plays its home games in the same building that hosted Milan's historic victory—to the Final Four led to countless comparisons with both the 1954 Milan team and its cinematic alter ego of Hickory High. The  Bulldogs stunned perennial power Michigan State 52–50 in the national semifinal to make it to the National Title Game, where they lost to Duke 61–59. (Butler forward Gordon Hayward narrowly missed a last-second half court shot that would have won the game, and the national championship, for Butler.) Appropriately, the Milan team, all but one of whom were alive at the time of the tournament, attended the Final Four (held just up the road at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis) as guests of Indiana governor Mitch Daniels.