The Wingate Spartans…1913 and 1914 State Champions

As many of you readers are aware, the Wingate basketball team won the Indiana state championships in 1913 and 1914. In the 1970s, I had the pleasure of interviewing Leland Olin, who was a member of those teams. He learned to play the game when he was a student at Elmdale grade school. He and his playmates practiced on a rough outdoor court by throwing a ball through a metal hoop fashioned by a local blacksmith. Sometimes the boys improvised by nailing a peachbasket to a wall!

When Leland attended Wingate High School, the team practiced twice a week in New Richmond’s tiny little gym five miles away, and on the other days the boys kept in shape by running for twenty minutes inside the Wingate auditorium. Having no gym, the Spartans played all of their home games at New Richmond, where the seating capacity was about 75 persons…no problem, as there were only 55 students in the upper four grades at Wingate at the time. The seven team members in 1913 were Leland, Forest Crane, Jesse Graves, John Blacker, McKinley Murdock, Lee Sinclair, and Homer Stonebraker, with Jesse Wood as their coach.

During the regular season, the Spartans had a record of 16-4, losing to Lebanon, Thorntown, and twice to Crawfordsville. A majority of the final scores were in the teens or twenties, but Wingate recorded scores of 75-7 against Waveland, 85-9 against Cayuga, and a phenonimal 108-8 against Hillsboro…a game in which Stonebraker scored an amazing 37 field goals!

There were 38 teams entered in the 1913 state tournament, held at Indiana University. New Richmond also had an outstanding team that year, but the principal forgot to send in the team’s application form, which made them ineligible. In their first game, the Spartans defeated Whiting 24-12, but their second contest against Rochester went into overtime, which they won 19-17. The determined crew then set aside powerful Indianapolis Manual and Lafayette Jeff to reach the championship game against South Bend.

The title game was fought hard all the way, and when the buzzer sounded, the score was knotted at 13 each. The first team to score two points would be declared the winner. Four overtimes went by, and still neither team could manage a goal. In the fifth overtime, a South Bend player made a free throw to put his team ahead 14-13, but they were still one point short. However, seconds later, Forest Crane plunked in the winning goal, and tiny little Wingate became the state champion! They became the first back-to-back champions when the team won again in 1914, defeating Anderson 36-8 in the title game. In that game, Stonebraker scored 18 points, even though he was roughed up under the basket the entire game. He collapsed from exhaustion near the end of the game, and suffered two broken fingers and three cracked ribs!

After graduating, Leland told me he played two years for Wabash College, and then served in the army in World War I. When he returned from the war, he started farming near New Richmond, where he remained all of his life. He loved watching basketball his entire life…at all levels…elementary, high school, and college. He was proud of his team’s accomplishments, and showed me the gold Elgin pocket watch that the hometown people awarded him and the other members of his team after the 1914 victory.

John “Butch” Dale is a retired teacher and County Sheriff. He has also been the librarian at Darlington the past 32 years, and is a well-known artist and author of local history.