Hoosier A 7-foot-5 prospect ranked land as commitment from Kentucky to Indiana….
It’s a fresh reminder of the ways in which college athletics is adjusting to its changing landscape.
Once again, Indiana will hold Hoosier Hysteria on the Friday night of homecoming weekend, Oct. 18, to maximize alumni exposure with so many fans in town. Attendees are encouraged to bring canned goods for Hoosier Hills Food Bank, like always.
Unlike in past years, however, the frills are mostly gone. IU will introduce its players and hold a short scrimmage, first featuring its women’s team, and then it’s men’s team.
And that will be it.
For years, Hoosier Hysteria — and events like it — followed a similar script. Light shows, loud music, maybe some pyro, all in the name of hype.
It was a pep rally on anabolic steroids, and as the event evolved, it became an important date on both the basketball calendar (the season is near!) and the recruiting calendar (look who’s in town!).
But times have, like they often do, changed.
Hoosier Hysteria is still an important recruiting event, but not for the same reasons. The portal has bled some of the emphasis out of high school recruiting. Most programs don’t bring their top targets to their midnight madness events, if they still have them, because they want those recruits to get a whole visit’s worth of attention to themselves.
Instead, Hysteria has become a way to bring large numbers of younger players — freshmen and sophomores — to campus. Perhaps for the first time, perhaps on a repeat visit, in either case in a much more getting-to-know-you environment. The days of walking Beejay Anya across the court have largely gone.
Still, the event has agency. In the past two years, Indiana has brought prominent recording artists G Herbo (2022) and Gucci Mane (2023) to play at its conclusion.
Both acts came with six-figure price tags, ratcheting up the cost of an event that approaches a quarter of a million dollars annually.
At a time when athletic departments are working to carve eight-figure holes in their budgets to accommodate oncoming revenue-sharing demands, those kinds of expenses become harder to swallow.
Think about it this way: Big Ten departments like Indiana’s will have the money (thanks to media rights revenues) to max out their revenue-sharing options and perhaps even go beyond them with greater investment in scholarships. Would you, as a fan, rather have a bells-and-whistles Hoosier Hysteria, or a department fully funding rev share for men’s basketball?
If you’d like an uglier alternative, would Hoosier Hysteria be worth three jobs inside the department being eliminated?
There’s even a plan to remake the evening into something financially forward-thinking — this year’s Hysteria will include an NIL fundraiser inside Cook Hall the night of the event. Per the news release announcing Hoosier Hysteria, fans can purchase access “for an opportunity to meet the team, takes photos, and get signatures from their favorite Hoosiers.” The event will be hosted by Hoosiers Connect, IU’s official NIL collective partner.
Whether other schools reexamine their own midnight madness events will be up to them. This isn’t reflective of a trend Indiana is following or attempting to start.
It’s just an athletic department, confronted with a budget problem created by shifting ground, taking a hard look at what’s necessary and what can be simplified or reorganized to accommodate that problem.
The Indiana University women’s basketball team has risen rapidly in recent seasons under the guidance of the maestro Teri Moren, who always does a masterful job of not only establishing roles for her respective players but getting them to BUY IN to them.
A team always consists of multiple individuals working together in pursuit of a common goal(s). When each and every individual member is not up to the task of accepting their identity within the overall infrastructure of a team, it can throw off the entire equilibrium of chemistry.
The Hoosiers have forged a pristine culture of group unity throughout the course of the last few years, and much of that has to do with the head coach’s wizardry in role clarification.
Those things being stated, here are what the super skipper’s individual assignments could look like for each Indiana University women’s basketball player in 2024-2025.
Sydney Parrish = SHOW TIME
Through Parrish’s first 4 NCAA seasons, she has been a superstar role player. In her 5th and final collegiate campaign, it is time for that previous sentence to exclude the final 2 words.
Expecting a floor general of CMM’s prototype to drop 20 PPG is outlandish. That is not to
Those things being stated, here are what the super skipper’s individual assignments could look like for each Indiana University women’s basketball player in 2024-2025.
Sydney Parrish = SHOW TIME
Through Parrish’s first 4 NCAA seasons, she has been a superstar role player. In her 5th and final collegiate campaign, it is time for that previous sentence to exclude the final 2 words.
Expecting a floor general of CMM’s prototype to drop 20 PPG is outlandish. That is not to say that she cannot do so, but doing so would go against her true brand of basketball. The lefty is licensed in offensive orchestration while also holding serious certifications in lockdown perimeter defense (just ask Caitlin Clark).
Shay Ciezki = NEVER LOSE CONFIDENCE IN YOUR JUMPER
Remember when Sara Scalia shot an icy 31.8% from downtown through her first 10 games as a Hoosier in 2022-2023? Yeah, we do not either. The 2024 Hanes Women’s 3-Point Contest champion will forever be remembered as one of the greatest shooters ever to sport the candy stripes. Surely, her memory blurred following any of her (rare) missed triples as she constantly proceeded onto the next
