2014 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection
Hoosier Hysteria in the tradition of "The Greatest Basketball Story Ever Told"
In the summer of 1962, the peripatetic and irrepressible Pete Gill was hired on a whim to coach basketball at tiny Ireland High School. There he would accomplish, against enormous odds, one of the great small-town feats in Indiana basketball history. With no starters taller than 5'10", few wins were predicted for the Spuds. Yet, after inflicting brutal preseason conditioning, employing a variety of unconventional motivational tactics, and overcoming fierce opposition, Gill molded the Spuds into a winning team that brought home the town's first and only sectional and regional titles. Relying on narrative strategies of creative nonfiction rather than strict historical rendering, Mike Roos brings to life a colorful and varied cast of characters and provides a compelling account of their struggles, wide-ranging emotions, and triumphs throughout the season.
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[Roos's] gift for descriptive detail, his deep knowledge of both the game of basketball and the culture of southern Indiana hamlets, and his from-the-heart dedication to the narratvie materials at hand make One Small Town, One Crazy Coach a compelling read.
" - Bloom Magazine
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You don't need to know a lot about basketball to fall in love with this book. It's more than a book about basketball. It's about the people of Ireland, the way they thought, the things they hoped, and their lives.
" - Little Indiana
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For One Small Town, One Crazy Coach's 302 lively pages, Mike Roos keeps an era and his childhood alive.
" - Indiana Magazine of History
