1954 Milan High School basketball team

The 1954 Milan High School Indians won the Indiana High School Boys Basketball Tournament championship in 1954. With an enrollment of only 161, Milan was the smallest school ever to win a single-class state basketball title in Indiana, beating the team from the much larger Muncie Central High School in a classic competition known as the Milan Miracle. The team and town are the inspiration for the 1986 film Hoosiers. The team finished its regular season 19–2 and sported a 28–2 overall record.

Unlike most states, Indiana held a single-class tournament in which all schools competed for the same championship in one of America's largest and most popular high school tournaments, until the separation into enrollment classes in 1997. Indiana still possessed a large rural population well into the 1950s and rural school consolidation was still in its infancy. As a result, most Indiana high schools of the era had what today are considered extremely small enrollments. Many of these small schools had realistic expectations of advancing several rounds into the tournament in that era, but they would almost inevitably fall in the regionals to urban schools from places such as South Bend, Evansville, Gary, Terre Haute, Muncie, and Indianapolis.

Coach Marvin Wood was hired two years previously, at the age of 24, after a collegiate playing career at Butler University and a coaching stint in French Lick. His hiring was controversial, coming on the heels of Superintendent Willard Green's firing of coach Herman "Snort" Grinstead, who ordered new uniforms without authorization. Wood's coaching style was the opposite of Grinstead's in many ways. He closed practice to outsiders, an act that removed one of the major forms of leisure time entertainment for the town's basketball-crazed population and angered many. He was impressed by the unusual scope of size and talent available in such a small school among the many boys trying out for the team, talent forged by a strong junior-high program. He taught them more patience than the run-and-gun Grinstead, culminating in a four-corner ball control offense he called the "cat-and-mouse".

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