Welcome to Year Six of the Excel H Sports ‘Shootin’ The Stars’.
This year we welcome Brett Yoder to the team for his insights to Indiana’s game of basketball.
This season we have a opening Episode a Girls Story and before the start of the Boys’ season another Episode.
Sit back and enjoy Brett’s take on basketball in Indiana, past and present, and if I dare say, the future!!
Heroes. We all have them. They change from when we’re kids to when we grow up, but they’re still there. Most kids pick superheroes to idolize, larger than life figures with powers that transcend reality. Then there are kids in Indiana. For decades, Hoosier kids looked up to heroes who didn’t play in the supernatural realm, but on the hardwood. Teenagers who led their local high school teams to sectional glory and gave people something to look forward to on a frigid Friday evening. These heroes may not be as prominent as they were 50 years ago when Hoosier Hysteria was booming, but they still pop up from time to time in different pockets of the state. If you grew up in northeast Indiana in the early 2000s like I did, there was a local hero that transcended both era and gender: Shanna Zolman.
Shanna Zolman grew up facing a reality that most girls basketball players have faced throughout the years. Even if they put in the same amount of work, or even more than their male counterparts do, they still won’t receive the same recognition or community support. Many girls’ games are played in front of weeknight crowds of around 100 parents and family members. Every once in a while, some great teams or players will come around and draw more attention, but it’s very rare for a girl’s program to break through in a way that goes beyond the traditional roles that boys and girls’ basketball typically hold in a community. Shanna and the early 2000s Wawasee Warriors did just that.
Growing up around Syracuse, there wasn’t a lot of elite local competition for a burgeoning hoops prodigy in the girl’s game. Shanna honed her skills in the gym against her older brother, working out with her dad and future high school coach Kem Zolman, and playing on high level AAU teams in the offseasons (this was back when you truly had to be a special player to actually make an AAU team). Kem remembers the frustration of watching his daughter get taken out early in games that quickly turned into blowouts because of Shanna’s overwhelming skill, and then not being reinserted into the lineup until the game was nearly over. Not because he thought she should play the whole game, but because it’s difficult to develop in that fashion. Randy Yoder who would later coach against her at Westview remembers refereeing one of her middle school games realizing they were going to be in trouble in the future when she reached high school. He didn’t forget either, he deployed a box-and-one defense against her in her very first varsity game ever as a freshman.
What makes Hoosier high school basketball heroes so special, is that they’re self-made. You don’t just wake up one morning and become one of the best basketball players in the state. You have to want it, and that desire can only come from within. An overbearing parent who drags their kid to the gym can probably produce a decent player, but not a great one. Shanna told me that basketball was never work for her. The 3–4-hour training sessions that left her dad asking her if they could go home to eat were something she looked forward to. Ask anyone who played or coached with or against her, what set her apart was her work ethic and discipline. She sacrificed many of the things normal teenagers prioritize off the court to maximize what she could do on it. The results speak for themselves.
By the time Shanna graduated in 2002, she was the all-time leading scorer in Indiana girls’ basketball history with 3,085 points. As wildly impressive as that is, some of the anecdotes I heard when talking to Shanna and others who were around her when she played stick out to me even more. Kem Zolman told me they rarely practiced a normal offense system, because they never faced a traditional defense. Shanna had box-and-one’s and triangle-and-two’s thrown at her on a nightly basis. She can even remember when a team would put two defenders on her off the ball, to the point that she wouldn’t cross half court, and the opposing team would play offense three on four.
People always marveled at her efficiency. She once scored 50 points while only missing one shot in a game against Northwood. An opposing team could spend countless hours game planning for her, and then their entire strategy would be nuked in seconds as Shanna would split a double team and get to the basket or simply pull up from 25-30 feet years before Steph Curry made it cool to do so. The stories like these are endless, just like the crowds that followed her and the Wawasee Warriors into every gym they played in.
The more Shanna and her teammates won, the faster word got out that something special was happening. Wawasee girls’ games quickly became somewhat of a traveling circus. Home games were an event. The 3,500-seat gym in Syracuse would be sold out during the JV game, something that was unheard of for any boy’s program, much less a girl’s program. Girls’ basketball became a financial windfall for the entire Wawasee athletic department in a way that benefited all student athletes. On the road, the Warrior fans traveled. The sellouts continued in opposing gyms. At Westview, the big sideline section of bleachers is always left up for girl’s games. Kem mentioned to the athletic director before the JV game that they may want to consider rolling it out for that game. Halfway through the JV game they realized he was right.
Pat Summit, arguably the greatest girls’ basketball coach of all-time, said she had never seen anything like it when she first came to watch Shanna play in high school. It was Hoosier Hysteria in its purest form. All of it culminated into the night when Shanna broke Stephanie White’s all-time scoring record at the Northside Gym in Elkhart in front of a sold-out crowd of 7,000 people. Talk about becoming a hero.
Being a hero of any kind has its pitfalls. Shanna wasn’t able to live the typical teenage life that most of her peers could. There was so much publicity with the Wawasee teams at that time that the local police were a constant and needed presence around the team. Anytime Shanna went out anywhere, someone in the community would know. There were eyes watching her every move and in every moment. Even though most people were well-intentioned, it was a lot, as it would have been for anyone. I don’t think there was a teenager anywhere though that was more built to handle it than Shanna. Ask any former coach, teammate, or even opponent, and you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who won’t tell you about how kind and gracious of a person she was, even at a young age. It would be easy for all the attention and praise she received to go to her head, but that wasn’t the case at all according to everyone I talked to. As much of a killer as she was on the court, she was just as humble and inclusive of others off of it.
As much as I’ve referred to Shanna as a hero here, I’m not sure she would like to be characterized as one. At least not in the sense as someone to be idolized for their basketball skills. In fact, Shanna flatly told me that she doesn’t care how she’s been perceived over the years by others, because she’s never been playing for them or their approval. She’s always played to represent her faith and values first and foremost. As I stated earlier, our heroes change as we get older, as do the reasons we look up to people. When I was a kid, I looked up to Shanna and others like her because of their prowess on the high school basketball court. As an adult I look up to her because of the way she authentically lives out what she believes. I could give you just as many anecdotes from people about the way she treats others with kindness as I can about what she did as a basketball player. That’s what will stick with me from my time researching this story, and it’s the legacy that will stick around longer than any of her records that were set on the court.
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