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We Will Rise
A True Story of Tragedy and Resurrection in the American Heartland
Steve Beaven • Amazon Publishing © 2020 • 288 pages

Leadership / Lessons from Sports

Life Advice / Psychology / Resilience

Take-Aways
• Basketball has been central to life in Evansville, Indiana, since the 1950s.
• A new coach built the University of Evansville team up to Division 1 standards.
• The Evansville Purple Aces had played only four games of the 1977-1978 season when the team perished
in a plane crash.
• In 1978, the University of Evansville chose Dick Walters as its new basketball coach. His leadership was
pivotal to the team’s rebirth.
• In the 1979-1980 season, the Aces joined the new Midwestern City Conference.
• In 1982, the resilient team won a place in the NCAA tournament.

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 Recommendation
In 1977, an aircraft crashed moments after taking off from an Indiana regional airport. On board were
the University of Evansville’s Purple Aces basketball team, their coach and associates. The tragedy
was traumatic for the small manufacturing town where Aces basketball had become an obsession. Journalist
Steve Beaven tells how a new coach and players, with the support of college officials, students and
townspeople, summoned the leadership, skill and courage to resurrect the basketball program, culminating
in 1982 with Evansville’s first trip to the NCAA tournament. The team offers a warm case history showing
how to bounce back and how to lead.

Summary

Basketball has been central to life in Evansville, Indiana, since the 1950s.

During World War II, Evansville was a thriving defense contracting town, manufacturing military
aircraft, ships and ammunition. By the 1950s, it had fallen on harder times. Chrysler, Servel Refrigeration
and International Harvester left town. Evansville College’s basketball program became the social glue that
held the town together.

In the late 1950s, the town got a boost when the Whirlpool Corporation established an Evansville plant
that provided thousands of jobs. By 1965, coach Arad McCutchan had led the school’s Purple Aces men’s
basketball team to three championships in the College Division, a nationwide collection of small schools now
known as Division II. That year, Sports Illustrated ran a feature story on the Aces. The team finished the
season with a 29-0 record and their fourth College Division championship title.

“These games made for lively winter evenings in Evansville, and the entire town was
crazy for its basketball team, indulging in tribal traditions foreign and confusing to fans
from other cities.”

In 1977, Whirlpool began layoffs. Evansville College had changed its name to the University of Evansville
(UE) and had moved up to Division I, where it competed with the college basketball elite. After coaching 31
years and leading the team to 514 wins, McCutchan retired. The university tapped Jerry Sloan as the team’s
new coach. Sloan had played with the Aces in the 1960s, and had recently retired after playing 11 years for
the National Basketball Association’s Chicago Bulls.

Although Sloan was talented, he suffered from self-doubt. He agonized whether to take an assistant coaching
job with the Bulls. Within days of accepting the UE job, he told college officials he was leaving. They were
thunderstruck.

A new coach built the University of Evansville team up to Division 1 standards.

The University chose Bobby Watson, 34, as a replacement. An exacting and charismatic veteran, Watson
had served as an assistant coach at three Division I schools. He hit the road to recruit the talent he would

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 need to make the Aces competitive. He redesigned the basketball program, upgrading travel arrangements
from buses to private planes, and imposing military-style discipline with strict academic requirements.

“Watson was made for Evansville. Every line of his Every word he spoke.”

Practice began in October – seven days a week, for two-and-a-half hours each day. Watson
was an exacting coach. His starters included Mike Duff, a standout player from Eldorado High School, 60
miles from Evansville. More than 100 schools had recruited him before Duff landed at UE.

The Evansville Purple Aces had played only four games of the 1977-1978 season
when the team perished in a plane crash.

By December 13, when the Aces were set to fly to Nashville to face Middle Tennessee State, they had lost
three of their first four games, including a humiliating 102-76 defeat at the hands of Larry Bird and the
Indiana State Sycamores. Their next four opponents promised to be less formidable.

The Nashville flight, Air Indiana 216, was scheduled for 4 p.m., but the aircraft couldn’t leave Indianapolis
because of bad weather. It finally arrived at Dress Regional Airport at 7 p.m. The members of the flight crew
sped through their preparations to make up for the delay. After 12 minutes on the ground, the plane took off
with 29 people on board, including crew members, 14 Aces players, Coach Watson, three university officials,
three student managers, a radio announcer and a couple of local boosters.

As the plane gained speed on the runway, its tail dragged and swerved. As soon as Air Indiana Flight 216 got
in the air, it was in trouble. It struggled to gain altitude, swayed side to side and flew so low it lopped
branches off trees. The pilots attempted to return to the airport, but the aircraft dropped nose first, crashed
onto railroad tracks and burst into flames.

Nearby residents heard the crash and raced to the scene, finding the burning plane in pieces. Bodies and
debris lay about the railroad tracks. Locals found four survivors, but three of them died at the scene. With no
road access and rain making the ground impassable, rescue vehicles had trouble reaching the crash site. The
lone survivor died at the hospital that night.

The next day, more than 1,000 people from the university and the town arrived for a memorial service at the
university’s Neu Chapel. The crowd exceeded the chapel’s seating capacity, so people stood in the aisles and
the lobby, and gathered on the steps outside.

“At , a group of bleary-eyed” [students] sat dumbstruck in the lounge at Moore Hall,
where they’d spent the whole night in numb confusion.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board later concluded that the flight crew had made
several errors as they rushed to prepare the plane for takeoff. They had tossed most of the luggage into
the back of the plane, adding too much weight to the tail section. The first officer underestimated the total
weight of the passengers, so the aircraft exceeded its overall weight limit. Someone neglected to remove the
gust locks – devices the crew insert to stabilize the right wing and tail while the aircraft is on the ground.
With the locks still in place, the airborne plane would be all but impossible to manage.

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 In 1978, the University of Evansville chose Dick Walters as its new basketball coach.
His leadership was pivotal to the team’s rebirth.

In the midst of the trauma, the University had to confront the bleak issue of what would happen to the
basketball program, in the short term and the future. College officials briefly considered carrying on with
new players, but they canceled the rest of the season. The hiring committee convened to recruit a new coach.

Working their way through 55 applications for the job, the committee settled on Dick Walters, 30, head
coach at the College of DuPage, a two-year school in suburban Chicago. Walters’s experience at
assembling a new team every season made him a skilled recruiter, with extensive contacts among coaches
at Midwestern high schools and community colleges. Walters faced multiple leadership challenges: He had
to scout talent and stoke enthusiasm for the new team. And he had to respect the memory of the dead.

Walters took the reins in February 1978. By the first practice in October, he’d put together a roster of
16 players. The community welcomed the team: Season ticket sales grew, enrollment in the Tip-Off
Club soared and a new campus club, the Purple Pride Gang, signed up 1,300 students.

“The first day of practice: than 400 fans filled the bleachers…to get their first look at the
team Walters had assembled out of spare parts.”

The season got off to a rough start. The Aces lost their season opener, an away game against Southern
Illinois. For fans, the team’s real debut was its first home game, against the DePaul Blue Demons on
November 29. Some 60 members of the national and local media showed up, including Sports Illustrated’s
Frank Deford, who had written the magazine’s feature on the Aces 13 years earlier. The UE team lost to
DePaul, 74-55. The losing streak continued until December 11, when UE beat Murray State by a single point.

By January, the team came together, as the most promising players Walters recruited – including Brad Leaf,
Theren Bullock and Eric Harris – showed their potential. They became the basis of the town’s basketball
rebirth. Under Walters’s encouraging leadership, the Aces completed their first full Division I season with a
13-16 record.

In the 1979-1980 season, the Aces joined the new Midwestern City Conference.

Playing in the conference opened new opportunities for money, media coverage and postseason
competition. It also offered a pathway to competing in the NCAA tournament, which was rapidly growing in
importance. In the next few years, with an assist from the new ESPN cable network, the NCAA tournament
would broaden from 40 to 64 teams. Broadcast rights would skyrocket in value, reaching $96 million in
1985.

“Basketball would soon succeed baseball as the national pastime, changing the economics
of college sports and giving small schools like the University of Evansville unprecedented
opportunity.”

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 To reflect the team’s burgeoning ambitions, Walters pushed for upgrades in the UE basketball program,
including a renovation of the locker rooms to include new stereo gear, carpeting, recliners and full-length
mirrors. The University bought a purple van for trips to and from the airport. And the coach demanded
improvements to UE’s Roberts Stadium. The college installed a new court and replaced wooden bleachers
with cushioned seats.

Walters wanted the University to replace Franklin House, the team’s dilapidated on-campus quarters. He
envisioned a luxurious home, with a whirlpool, a steam room and a film theater. He pictured a Purple Aces
statue on the front lawn with an accompanying fountain. He wanted to renew the town’s pride in its team.

The Aces finished 1980 with an 18-10 record, not good enough to qualify for the NCAA tournament. But
with their momentum growing, the Aces attracted talented recruits. They finished the 1981 season 19-9, and
entered 1981-1982 in high spirits – confident in the skills of co-captains Leaf and Bullock and promising new
recruits Richie Johnson and Rick McKinstry. In addition, Emir Turam, a 7'1" center from Turkey, improved
his play after a slow start. The team knew the MCC champions would get an automatic bid to the NCAA
tournament, now one of the major events in sports.

In 1982, the resilient team won a place in the NCAA tournament.

To win the MCC championship, the Aces would have to vanquish the Loyola Ramblers three times. The
two teams had long maintained a nasty rivalry marked by trash talk and rough play. The Aces won the first
matchup in January, 84-80. They triumphed in the second game in February. The teams met for the third
time in March for a game that would decide the MCC championship. At halftime, the Aces were up by three,
but their lead vanished in the first minutes of the second half. Then Turam seized his moment, scoring
14 points, eight in a single four-minute span. The final score: Evansville, 81-72. The Aces won a place in the
NCAA tournament.

At Dress Regional Airport, thousands of cheering fans greeted Coach Walters and the returning Aces.
The same airport had been the site of the 1977 tragedy, but on this evening, fans could celebrate the
accomplishments of their new team.

On March 11, the Aces traveled to Tulsa to play against the Marquette University Warriors, as one of 48
teams competing in eight sites across the United States. CBS broadcast the game, as did Evansville radio. In
Evansville, fans gathered to watch, and hundreds of students crammed into UE’s Harper Dining Center to
watch the game on a giant television screen.

“Teams play and programs carry on, but the tradition that Evansville possesses is the
greater thing, because it has a life all its own.” (Frank Deford, Sports Illustrated)

Despite the coach's leadership and the team’s work and resilience, a Hollywood ending was not to be.
The Aces pulled ahead early in the first half, but they lost momentum. They rallied in the second half, but
Marquette won, 67-62.

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 The 1982 Purple Aces achieved more than any Evansville basketball team before them. They helped heal
the trauma of the 1977 crash and erase the team’s small-school, long-shot status. During the next couple
of decades, the Purple Aces returned to the NCAA tournament four more times.

About the Author

Steve Beaven is a former staff writer for The Oregonian. His writing has appeared in The New York Times
and the Chicago Tribune.

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