This post was provided by News Now Warsaw

By Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw

We are on the verge of the Indiana girls basketball state tournament, which starts next Tuesday.

This tournament is a big deal every year, but this one is different.

This is the 50th state tournament. For five decades, one year at a time, high school girls have been proving just how much the girls game has grown and just what they are capable of on the basketball floor.

Which is quite ironic considering how it all started.

When the leadership in the home office of the IHSAA was considering girls basketball as a sanctioned sport in the early 1970’s, there were plenty of doubters. Some were so convinced that the dream of having girls basketball become a sport here would never fly and gave real consideration to making girls games played on half the court—they didn’t think the girls could run up and down the court for a 32-minute game.

With their arms figuratively folded, the commissioners relented and let the girls play the same way the boys did.

Are we ever glad they did!

In the early winter of 1975, girls started playing basketball and the teams in our area were way ahead of everyone else.

As you know, Warsaw won that first IHSAA state title in 1976. And not only did they win it, they set the entire state of Indiana on fire in the process. That first championship game was broadcast statewide, and everyone was watching.

Some out of curiosity, some out of a hope that, somehow, Hoosiers would embrace the quality of the product they would see that night.

We did.

I remember watching the final with my parents.

I was eight years old at the time, and what I remember about that night is watching Judi Warren and the Lady Tigers dribbling circles around Bloomfield and winning 57-52.
And the fire was lit.

Girls from Evansville to Angola and Gary to Jeffersonville had witnessed what was possible. The skill those girls — from both teams — displayed at Hinkle Fieldhouse that night showed every girl of every age what they could do if they worked hard at it.

And they set out the next day to make sure that they were going to find themselves living out their championship dreams someday.

Next month at the 50th girls state finals, the current leadership of the IHSAA will take the exact opposite approach of their predecessors. They will embrace the impact of those early teams and the girls who “wowed” us all. They will bring back as many of the best of the best girls players as they can.

They will honor them.

They will thank them.

They will measure how far girls basketball really has come.

And woven through it all will be the evidence of how the schools, teams, players and coaches from our area were always at the cutting edge of it.

• 1976 and 1978 Warsaw, state champs.
• 1985 Wawasee, state runner-up.
• 1999 NorthWood, state champs.
• 1991 Warsaw, state runner-up.
• 2000 and 2001 Triton, back-to-back state champs.
  2004 Warsaw, state runner-up.
• 2007 Wawasee, state runner-up.
• 2015 Tippecanoe Valley, state runner-up.
• 2020 NorthWood, state champs.

And add to these the stories of schools like Columbia City and Rochester, Fairfield and Argos, and Jimtown and Bethany Christian—who all were influenced by people connected to this cradle of girls basketball.

And 2025? Well, that story is about to be written.

This decades-long saga has worked its way into every corner of the state, but the whole state knows that it started here, with us. Over the course of the next month, we will all be reminded of that very fact.

We will remember the players and coaches, and the moments they burned into our sports souls over the last five decades.

We will understand just how far the game of girls basketball has come.

We will be challenged to imagine how far it still can go.

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