With respect to my experiences inside Broad Ripple High School when outside of classrooms or study hall periods and outside my lunchtime period in the school cafeteria, during the Spring of 1963 in the second term of my sophomore year, pretty much the only thing I can recall are the pep rallies in the school's gymnasium. After the school's all-white basketball team won the Indianapolis High School Sectional tournament that was played in the Butler College sports arena (located within walking distance from where I lived in Indianapolis), it looked for awhile like Broad Ripple's basketball team actually had a chance to possibly win the Indiana State High School basketball state championship in 1963. And that's why special pep rallies were held to cheer on the school basketball team during the school day that semester.
In the early 1960's, basketball team competition between Indiana high school teams was a much bigger deal than it was between the New York City high school teams who then played against each other in the Public School Athletic League [PSAL] games in New York City. The high school athletes/jocks who were on Broad Ripple's basketball team, for example had a much higher status within that school, whether they won or lost, than the athletes who were on the high school basketball teams in New York City ever enjoyed. And the Indianapolis-based local television stations broadcast live many of the high school basketball games of Indiana's state high school basketball tournament in a way that none of the local New York City television stations ever did.
During my sophomore year at Broad Ripple, I--like most of the other students in the school--didn't think there was any cultural significance in the fact that the male students who were on the school's sports teams and the team's female cheerleaders had much higher status and popularity socially within the high school relative to the more intellectual students in the school than did their counterparts in New York City's public schools; where there wasn't as much encouragement of students to attend and cheer at their school's football team and basketball team games as in the Indiana public high schools.
After all, despite never having any interest in even ever trying out for any junior high school or high school sports team, prior to the second semester of my sophomore year in high school in Indianapolis, much of my time outside of school all-year-round in New York City was spent playing basketball, football, stick-ball and softball in school playgrounds, on basketball courts near parking lots, on parking lots used as stick-ball fields and in nearby city parks, with older neighborhood guys.
In retrospect, by the time I was in junior high school, I think I realized that unless I was willing to spend hours and hours of all my free daylight time outside of school during the week, and all day on weekends, by the basketball hoops in the parking lot field a few blocks from where I lived, practicing my jump shots, outside set shots and foul shots over and over again, until I would be able to automatically shoot the basketball through the hoop over 90 percent of the time during a game at school, making the junior high school or high school basketball team as a guard would always be unlikely. And by junior high school, spending some of my time practicing saxophone then seemed more interesting to me than spending all of my free time practicing shots alone on the basketball for long hours; until I got to the point where the basketballs from my shots always fell through the hoop during a game over 90 percent of the time.
But still, as a Broad Ripple H.S. sophomore in the Spring of 1963, I was as excited as everybody else at the school who may have watched Broad Ripple's basketball team play, in games that were televised by a local television station, and begin to come close to possibly winning the Indiana State high school basketball tournament in 1963.
Yet, despite my still avid interest in whether or not Broad Ripple's basketball team was going to be able to go on to win the Indiana state basketball tournament that year, I did not even consider attending in person any of the basketball games at Butler University's sports arena in which Broad Ripple's team was playing.
In retrospect, I think the reason I only watched the Spring 1963 Broad Ripple H.S. basketball team's tournament games on television that year was that--since in New York City prior to 1963 I had always attended a basketball game as a spectator along with a friend, a group of friends, classmates or my father--as a high school sophomore I was not used to ever attending a sporting event in which, alone, I sat in the stands as a spectator. And because, having just moved to Indianapolis in the Spring term of 1963, I had no friend or friends with whom I could go with to watch the school basketball games in person, that meant I still felt uncomfortable about sitting alone at a high school game, when all the other students there seemed to be attending the event with a friend, friends, or dates.
Ironically, by the time I completed my first play, "A Ball In A Basket," during the first term of my freshman year at Columbia in the Fall of 1965, I had ended up utilizing some of my memories of how the basketball coach at Broad Ripple and the Broad Ripple principal addressed the students in the school's gymnasium and led them in a "Yes, you bet! We want another net!" chant in the Spring of 1963; to create a dramatic play that criticized social and mass conformity and the over-emphasis on "sports" in an "all-American" U.S. high school and city in the Midwest. Despite the fact that only two years before I, myself, had still been as much into enjoying the over-emphasis of sports and jock culture as everybody else at Broad Ripple H.S. in the Spring of 1963. And that pretty much ends what I now recall of my experience attending Broad Ripple H.S. during the second term of my sophomore year that ended in early June 1963.
