MEDORA, Ind. — Players for Medora Aerial Academy accept taken the cloister cutting assignment boots because their families cannot allow basketball shoes. Best smoke cigarettes. Some allocution aboveboard of biologic use. All but a few appear from burst homes. Of the almost 400 schools in a accompaniment that reveres boys aerial academy basketball, none absent added aftermost division than the 0-22 Medora Hornets, beneath the first-year drillmaster Marty Young, the youngest arch drillmaster in the state.
Now 23, Young is not assured many, if any, on-court victories during the division that starts on Saturday, either. But he counts wins and losses abnormally from most.
“If they’re in the gym these two hours, then I know they’re not in trouble,” Young said.
Poverty rates are high here, college graduates few. Drug use is rampant, several said, and many residents live in ramshackle trailer homes strewn about the hills that surround the checkerboard streets of the town. In these depressed times, there is little to cheer but the high school basketball team.
Except it does not win.
The lone basketball championship banner hanging in the gym dates to 1949. There has not been a winning season in decades. Counter to those sepia-toned images that outsiders have of small-town Indiana, the boys here rarely dream anymore of starring for the local team.
That is the unexpected predicament confronting Young, the kind of Indiana boy who grew up sleeping with a basketball. Indiana, after all, is the home of “Hoosiers,” the 1986 movie loosely based on the small-town 1954 Milan High team that beat all the bigger schools to win the state championship. Medora, about 65 miles west of Milan, could be this generation’s anti-Hoosiers.
“It used to be such a big deal,” said Maria Powell, born and raised in Medora and now the mother of one of the basketball players. She recalled postgame parties with classmates at a pizza place called The Covered Bridge — long since closed — when she was in high school. “Basketball was just what you lived for.”
Medora, with 16 members in the senior class, is the fifth-smallest public high school in Indiana. It is slowly shrinking, like the town of about 500 itself. Two of three large feed mills are gone. An automotive plastics factory employed several hundred until it closed in 1988. A brick plant on the edge of town died in 1992.
“That’s when, basically, Medora started falling apart,” said Penny England, a lifelong resident and the mother of one of the boys on the team.
Now, Powell said, she is leery to be alone downtown where boys loiter. (“There ain’t much to do in this small town,” Wes Ray, a senior basketball player, said.) She lives “out in the boonies,” she said, where a neighbor was a “meth head.” The home’s three children (born to three fathers) sometimes ran over the hill to her house to escape his abuse. They are now in foster care. One is on the basketball team.
Of the 19 boys on this season’s roster, five live with both their mother and father. The rest live with single mothers, grandparents, older siblings or foster parents. Several see Young as a dependable father figure, even if he is only a few years older.
“I think they’d really rather have somebody yelling at them than have no one wondering about them at all,” Powell said.
Young grew up comfortably on a farm a few miles away. He attended the much-larger Brownstown High and was one of the best basketball players in the county. He became a two-time all-conference player at Division III Franklin College, north toward Indianapolis.
A teammate there told Young how his high school coach insulted the team after a bad loss.
“We couldn’t have even beaten Medora tonight,” the coach would say.
Wanting to teach, Young interviewed for the sixth-grade job at Medora. It was a package deal; officials wanted him to be the head coach of the varsity basketball team, too.
He was instantly surprised at the things he saw and heard.
“I’ve been to college,” Young said. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff. But these kids that I’m teaching in sixth grade know more about what goes on in the street than I ever thought of. This small, rural town.”
With help from others, including his own parents and grandparents, Young often buys some boys shoes, clothes and meals. He has kicked in the $40 it costs the uninsured to get the required physical exams.
He enlisted an uncle, Dennis Pace, to serve as his assistant for a varsity squad that lost by an average of 31 points. Young’s high school teammate Matt Rotert coaches the junior varsity. Last year, it lost games by 51-0 and by 93-2.
The biggest hurdle, Rotert said, is the home life of many boys. “I don’t think they’re used to people expecting something out of them,” Rotert said.
Pace spent much of a recent day driving around town and through the neighboring hills, showing where players lived.
“You’ve got kids who struggle with clothes or coats or shoes,” Pace said. “Yet their parents always have cigarettes or beer or satellite TVs.”
