Faith Wiseman and the Indian Creek girls basketball team are coming off of a run to the Class 3A semistate final.
Daily Journal file photo
Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series taking stock of where each of Johnson County’s high school athletic departments stand heading into the 2023-24 school year. Today we take a look at Indian Creek, which is in the middle of some large-scale campus upgrades as enrollment continues to trend upward.
When he took over as Indian Creek’s athletic director six summers ago, Derek Perry had to break in six new varsity coaches. He’s pretty proud of the fact that as he enters his seventh year at the helm, all but one of those coaches is still with him.
The greater stability has helped the Braves lay an increasingly solid foundation as a budding Class 3A power — and not just in one or two sports.
“We’ve seen significant (success) in multiple sports, whether it be cross country, track, basketball,” Perry said. “It’s good to see that it’s hitting a majority of sports, and that’s the success we’re having team-wise and individual — some of our cross country kids, our track kids and different individual events. Swimming. That’s where I think you can say you measure your success on not just one or two sports, but what you’re doing out of all your sports. I think that’s probably what I’m most proud of with our coaches. They do a great job and have had some success, and hopefully we keep building on that.”
Indian Creek is doing plenty of building, and in more ways than one. The 2022-23 school year saw the Braves field boys and girls soccer teams for the first time; both made their state tournament debuts last October and will be playing full varsity schedules this fall.
While that was happening, progress continued on the massive construction projects that have blocked off driveways and parking lots for the last two years. Football and softball both christened new turf fields, and the hope is that another will be added for baseball in the next year. In the meantime, the school is just months away from opening up a new fieldhouse space that will dramatically alter the course of Indian Creek athletics.
The new facility, part of a nearly $40 million high school upgrade that will also include a sprawling new 916-seat auditorium, will add some 68,000 square feet of new indoor athletic space on the back side of the school. That space features three basketball courts — two of which will have multi-purpose flooring to allow for baseball and softball hitting space — along with a new weight room, cardio room, wrestling room and a suspended indoor track.
Perry is hopeful that the fieldhouse will be usable when students return from fall break, though he says that’s not set in stone. Whenever it does open up, it will be a very welcome addition.
“When I coached basketball in the past and even now,” Perry said, “some of our youth league and feeder teams are only getting one or two nights a week, and we have kids out until 9:00. This is going to hopefully give them three or four days a week, and we’re not going to have elementary- and intermediate-age kids out until 9:00. From a competitive standpoint, it was much needed, and it was probably needed 10 or 15 years ago.”
It should definitely be needed in the future. With a not insignificant amount of new housing being built in the district, Indian Creek’s enrollment — 591 students in the 2021-22 school year, the last time the IHSAA took a head count — should continue to trend upward in the years to come, leaving the Braves firmly entrenched in a Class 3A that will be growing when the IHSAA’s new classification system takes effect in 2024-25.
That new system will bring about 20 of the smallest class 4A schools, a group that is expected to include both Greenwood and Roncalli, down a class. Though the shift could make postseason life a little more challenging for the Braves, Perry doesn’t expect it to change his teams’ overall approach.
“Competition’s good,” he said. “I don’t think we back down or are scared of that.”
Nor should they be. This past winter alone, Indian Creek’s girls basketball team advanced to the semistate final, wrestler Jackson Heaston was a state runner-up at 113 pounds and diver Ella Taylor earned a state medal. Three different Braves teams — boys tennis and boys and girls basketball — put together unbeaten seasons within the Western Indiana Conference.
Though sectional alignments may change for Indian Creek in the near future, Perry doesn’t anticipate a shift in conference affiliation. The school joined the WIC in the fall of 2016 and isn’t looking for a new home. Some of the road trips are a bit lengthy, but from a competitive standpoint, the league has been a good fit for the Braves across the board.
“I like it from the standpoint where every sport has a conference,” Perry said. “Before, I think swimming didn’t have a conference. This gives every sport a playing field to compete for a conference championship, whether it be a team one or individually. So no, I don’t see us moving out of the WIC anytime soon.”
Perry also doesn’t envision Indian Creek experiencing the type of rapid enrollment flare-up that other rural-turned-suburban schools like Whiteland and Hamilton Southeastern have gone through over the past two or three decades. The school isn’t going to get smaller, he says, but it’s also not likely to be playing in the Class 5A football tournament come 2035 or 2040.
“For years people have talked about, we’re going to explode one of these times,” Perry said. “I don’t know that that will ever happen, but I do feel there’ll be a gradual increase from year to year. … You have a lot of the farming and agriculture that, that’s their way of life. I don’t foresee big bulks of land being sold off. I think the farming community down here is very strong and a continuous family tradition.
“I’m not opposed to growing, or having that growth. I just hope it happens gradually rather than blowing up.”
Even if the overall student body numbers don’t blow up, the athletic department appears poised to do so. Already an attractive transfer destination in recent years — several of the Braves’ top athletes have migrated in from elsewhere, whether before high school or otherwise — Indian Creek might start looking better and better as its campus grows and its teams keep winning.
“I feel really good with where we’re at,” Perry said. “Athletics, I think it’s at an all-time high here at Indian Creek and I think it’s something a lot of families want to be a part of.”
