Mishawaka Sports History: The Cavemen, the Knights, the Pilots, and the town's own games

Sports · the Cavemen, the Knights, the Pilots, and the town's own games

Mishawaka's sporting record is deeper than a city of fifty thousand has any right to expect. Its public high school holds seven IHSAA team championships across three sports and reached the state finals in four; its Catholic high school won three football titles in four years in the 1970s, a volleyball title in the tournament's second year of existence, two girls soccer titles, and sent three players to the NBA in six years; its small Christian university holds forty-eight national team championships in the NAIA and NCCAA record, recomputed below from the university's own table. The town produced a 217-game winner in the major leagues, a Chicago Bears halfback who led the NFL in punting, the ninth Indiana Miss Basketball, a two-time national cross country champion, and an LPGA tournament winner — and it invented, in a park beside Bethel College in 1980, the World Wiffle Ball Championship. This record owns teams, titles, venues and athletes. The institutions behind the teams stand in Schools; the people who merely passed through the record books stand here at the size the evidence gives them. Honors are printed as the governing records state them, and where two records disagree, both are printed.

The banked Sports file tells the city's athletes inside their teams' stories, school by school and era by era, so that a reader cannot see the whole company at once or tell at a glance which tie binds each name to the city. This addendum draws the register out into its three rolls — born here, formed here, chose this ground — kept separate, each name with its tie and one line of record, compiled only from names the banked sports and halls-of-fame files already carry; and it runs the women's-league test the audit assigned, against the league's own register.