<p>They came to every home game, to worship at a different kind of church.</p><p>Families and friends, neighbors and strangers packed high school gymnasiums to cheer on their local teams. Rivalries between nearby towns intensified. The teams were a source of community pride.</p><p>“You hear people say, ‘In Indiana, basketball is a religion.’ There’s a lot of truth to that,” said Chandler Lighty, executive director of the Indiana Archives and Records Administration. “For a lot of people, it was the place to gather and share something in common, supporting the kids in the community.”</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]<p>The early days of Indiana basketball laid the foundation for a statewide obsession. Historian Lighty has spent considerable time studying the years of the 1910s, reaching back into the past to unearth the roots of Hoosier Hysteria.</p><p>He’ll share his perspective during a special program at the Johnson County Museum of History. The museum and the Johnson County Public Library will host the event as part of the Voices From the Past storytellers series at 1:30 p.m. Saturday. With basketball season just around the corner, it’s an opportunity for people to learn about the beginnings of basketball in the state, and how it cultivated one of the era’s most dominant teams, the Franklin Wonder Five.</p><p>“I hope visitors will get a feeling for the rich history of basketball in the state and how far back that history goes. Also, that Franklin was involved from the very beginning,” said David Pfeiffer, director of the Johnson County Museum of History.</p><p>Basketball in the early 1900s would be almost unrecognizable to fans of today’s game, Lighty said. Dribbling was not allowed; teams could only advance the ball through passing. Jump shots had not been invented yet. Some games featured teams with with more than five players on the court at a time.</p><p>Guards rarely scored — they were defensive specialists. Basketball courts from school to school could vary greatly, including some that had dirt floors and shorter rims, Lighty said.</p><p>“In some respects, it was a very different game,” he said. “The game was similar, but there were some major differences.”</p><p>The history of basketball in Indiana has long been a fascinating topic to Lighty. He grew up in Crawfordsville, and had heard the stories of their 1911 team, which was the first state champion. Another nearby town in his county, Wingate, was champion in 1913 and 1914.</p><p>That history was ingrained in the region. But when Lighty wanted to learn more about those teams and that era, he found historical research was lacking.</p><p>“I was looking around for things to read about those teams, and wasn’t happy about what I was finding,” he said.</p><p>So as he finished his undergraduate degree in history, Lighty decided to the project would be worthwhile to pursue. His research carried on for about five or six years, before he started writing about that 1911 Crawfordsville High School championship team.</p><p>That project led to him researching out and writing about the histories of the other champions of the 1910s: Lebanon, Wingate, Thorntown and Lafayette.</p><p>Those teams had fascinating stories. Lebanon won three of the first eight state championships in Indiana. Wingate, the first back-to-back champs in the state, had only 22 boys in the entire school and no home gymnasium of their own. But they had a star in Homer Stonebreaker, who once scored 74 points in a victory and was one of the first big men to be a game-changer.</p><p>“By all accounts, he just dominated the competition,” Lighty said. “The documentation isn’t complete, but you can extrapolate and figure he was scoring more than double what other teams were scoring in a game.”</p><p>Though he never specifically covered the powerhouse 1920s teams of the Franklin Wonder Five, Lighty was well aware of the impact those teams had on Indiana basketball history. Those teams, led by their star Fuzzy Vandivier and coach Ernest “Griz” Wagner, won three state championships in a row from 1920 to 1922. They remain one of only two teams to have ever won three straight championships.</p><p>“The Franklin Wonder Five story is a really unique one. So when Dave Pfeiffer reached out to me and asked if I’d be willing to do something, I thought I could do the background of their championship run, and some context about what was happening at that time,” Lighty said.</p><p>Tying together his research with that Franklin team will be the basis of his presentation in Johnson County.</p><p>Lighty will try to distill his discussion Saturday into a central idea: What makes basketball in Indiana so unique to Indiana, and why did it take hold here? His hope is to lay out the background of those early days, and how it led to Franklin’s own championship run.</p><p>“I want it to be a survey on how the path was laid for Franklin to win from ‘20 to ‘22,” he said.</p>[sc:pullout-title pullout-title="If you go" ][sc:pullout-text-begin]<p><strong>"Early Indiana Basketball History"</strong></p><p>What: A presentation of Hoosier high school basketball in the 1910s, given by Chandler Lighty, executive director of the Indiana Archives and Records Administration.</p><p>When: 1:30 p.m. Saturday</p><p>Where: Johnson County Museum of History, 137 N. Main St., Franklin</p><p>Who: Presented by the museum and the Johnson County Public Library as part of the Voices from the Past storyteller series</p><p>Cost: Free and open to the public. Attendance is limited, so attendees must reserve a spot by calling the museum at 317-346-4500 or emailing Michelle Cataldi at <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>.</p>[sc:pullout-text-end]
