1954 Milan High School Basketball Team - Aftermath

Aftermath

40,000 people descended on Milan (population: 1,150) the next day as the team returned home from Indianapolis, lining Highway 101 for 13 miles to congratulate the Indians.

As schools consolidated throughout Indiana, the days of small-town success gradually ended. Less 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 which 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. 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-two 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 1952-3 and 1953-4 seasons, merging the 1953 quarter-final opponent, the South Bend Bears, with the scoring pattern from the 1954 championship win against Muncie Central.

Finally, a deeply divided IHSAA ended the one-class system in 1997, splitting the remaining 300-plus high schools into four classes based on enrollment size. Many, including Plump, expressed outrage as the days of a David having a chance to slay Goliath in March ended in Indiana.

Today only two states remain single-class for high school basketball championships. While Delaware has only 56 high schools, Kentucky, with 279 high schools, remains committed to the single class format. Unlike in Indiana, which now has many large high schools, Kentucky has only five coeducational high schools with 2,000 or more pupils, plus two all-boys Catholic high schools that each enroll over 1,300 and four all-girls Catholic high schools with enrollments between 500 and 1,000. (Indiana has no single-sex high schools of any size.) Several smaller high schools, including a few as small as Milan, have either won Kentucky's state basketball title or made deep state tournament runs in recent years.

The 2010 run of Butler—a mid-major university team that to this day plays its home games in the same building that hosted Milan's historic victory—to the Final Four and to the National Title Game where it ultimately lost to Duke 61-59 after beating perennial power Michigan State 52-50 in the national semifinal led to countless comparisons with both the 1954 Milan team and its cinematic alter ego of Hickory High. In a seemingly appropriate parallel, the Milan team, all but one of whom were alive at the time of the 2010 NCAA tournament, attended the Final Four at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis as guests of Indiana governor Mitch Daniels.