The guide to Indiana University sports and culture

By Matthew Byrne matbyrne@iu.edu

The seemingly all-day tailgating. Candy-striped pants and Martha the Mop Lady. Fall sweater weather and smacking the boards before corner kicks. Cyclists racing to the sound of their respective thundering clans. Spring sunsets as the backdrop for seven-to-nine innings.

Welcome to the scenery of Indiana University’s sports — to quote one sports announcer: “Where basketball is religion.” For rivalry and ranked matchups, students will line up outside Simon Skojdt Assembly Hall for hours in the cold for the best seats to watch the Hoosiers.

Residents of the state of Indiana are nicknamed Hoosiers. This is also the name for the school’s 24 sports teams, though at one point, Indiana’s mascot was the bison. Regardless, corresponding with the 24-sport medley on campus, Hoosier fans are impassioned.

The football schedule begins the first week of September, as the Hoosiers, which compete in the 14-team Big Ten Conference, play every Friday or Saturday up to the end of November. The team’s season-opener is at 3:30 p.m. EST on September 2 versus Ohio State.

The parking lots encircling Memorial Stadium will be packed with thousands of fans for home games, as will the nearby Tailgating Fields across the street. Though football isn’t Indiana’s staple sport — the team has had back-to-back losing seasons — it’s the lone repeating sport that features lively all-day activities for students: from pregame tailgates, to the game itself, to afterparties. Getting enough rest and staying hydrated are important for gamedays.

Student tickets to football games cost $120. The price jumps to $440 to combine basketball tickets. Basketball is synonymous with Indiana and the basketball stadium, Assembly Hall, becomes more than rowdy welcoming rivals like Purdue. The five-minute video on YouTube titled “Proof that Indiana has the best fans in college basketball” shows clips of frenzied fans at the Hall, starting with the renowned “Wat Shot” in 2011.

Indiana has won five national championships in program history, the latest in 1987. Current head coach Mike Woodson, who was appointed before the team’s 2021-2022 season, played at Indiana in college and has coached in the NBA. Indiana hadn’t contended for the NCAA Tournament since 2016, until back-to-back Tournament appearances the past two seasons under Woodson. Players Jalen Hood-Schifino and Trayce Jackson-Davis were selected in this year’s NBA Draft.

The women’s basketball team, which likewise plays games inside Assembly Hall, has been on the rise under ninth-year head coach Teri Moren. The Hoosiers have posted eight consecutive 20win seasons and reached their first Elite Eight in the 2021 NCAA Tournament. This past season, Moren was named the program’s first-ever Associated Press National Coach of the Year as Indiana won the

Big Ten regular-season title for the first time in 40 years — also playing in front of the first sellout crowd in program history. Guard Grace Berger, Indiana’s all-time winningest player, was selected by the Indiana Fever in this year’s WNBA Draft.

The gameday experience at Assembly Hall has traditions such as players wearing the iconic cream and crimson striped pants during warmups and Martha the Mop Lady — an opera singer named Martha Webster mopping the floors of Assembly Hall shown on the video board — singing the school’s fight song “Indiana, our Indiana” before tipoff. This video can be found on YouTube.

The caption from the Indiana University Athletics video reads, “During the mid 1970s, Indiana Farm Bureau