Russ Mann
4.7K posts
@RussMann09
Me: LC 🏈 HC | Ava & Annie: Carmel | Keeping us all together, Abbie: College Wood Elementary
WHOA! 10.👀
Can’t beat this Spring Break view!
36 years ago today, a day I’ll never forget. March 23, 1990. The Hoosier Dome. Two semifinals in the morning, and then a state championship game that felt bigger than a state championship game. 41,046 people packed into the building, the largest crowd ever to watch a high school basketball game. It didn’t feel real. It felt like something closer to a Final Four than anything tied to high school. Even at 9 years old, I could sense it. The noise, the scale, the anticipation. This wasn’t just a game. This was Indiana basketball at its absolute peak. I didn’t grow up in Indiana, but my parents did, and my dad wasn’t going to let me miss it. So we piled into the car the night before and drove down to Indianapolis, chasing something that meant more to him than I probably understood at the time. Because for him, this wasn’t just about that day. It went back to 1972. Elkhart’s North Side Gym. A sectional game. Middle of the week. About 5,000 people packed into that place, and he was on the floor, scoring a few buckets in front of a crowd that, at the time, probably felt just as big as the Dome would years later. Did they win? Nope. He never bragged about it. If anything, he downplayed it. But when we went back just last year and he walked me onto that floor, pointing things out, retracing it possession by possession, you could see it come back to him. Even in a quiet gym, you could feel what it must have been like. A sea of people, all of it right on top of you. That was his version of the magic. Now here we were in 1990, and that same feeling had been magnified to a level neither of us had ever seen before. An undefeated season. One game away from the first state championship in Concord history. A pocket of green sitting in a sea of red, holding onto the belief that this was finally it. And I felt it too. Even at 9 years old, I understood what the day meant. I could feel the magic of it. I just happened to be on the wrong side of it. Standing in the way was Damon Bailey, already the face of Indiana basketball before he ever stepped on a college floor. Bedford North Lawrence. Three Final Fours in four years. The state’s all-time leading scorer. The kind of player who didn’t just meet expectations, he carried everyone’s dreams. He wasn’t just great. He was inevitable. And years later, I’d find myself at IU, watching the end of Bob Knight’s era unfold in 2000, still hearing Bailey’s name echo, still understanding what he meant to that the state. I loved watching him play. It all connected back to that day. But in 1990, I was just a kid sitting next to my dad 18 rows up, watching his moment unfold. I knew how good Jamar Johnson was. I knew what Concord had. And I also knew, in that early way you start to understand the game, that moments like this don’t come around often. Two years after Shawn Kemp had come through, there was an urgency to it. The season was a surprise. Win now, or it might never happened. And then it slipped. I still can’t watch the fourth quarter. Not because of the game itself, but because of what it meant to him. I remember my dad in that moment more than anything else. What it took out of him. That kind of heartbreak doesn’t go away. It just settles in. But I’m still glad I was there. Because some moments aren’t about how they end. They’re about being there when something mattered that much, when a place, a game, and a group of people all felt connected in a way that’s hard to explain if you didn’t live it. The #ThisisHoosierHysteria moment will always stay with me. I still have the ticket to prove it.
Russ Mann is back coaching in the MIC. bit.ly/4azwrju
