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 Saturday, October 14
Hoosier fans welcome post-Knight era
 
 Associated Press

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- They traveled from miles around Friday night to Assembly Hall.

Midnight Madness
Jason Hite is mad about Indiana basketball.
To see their team and their new leader, coach Mike Davis, and to show their support for the program.

"I'm a Hoosier fan, and I always will be," said Tim Holder, who traveled from Cincinnati and waited outside for nearly four hours. "There's more to Indiana basketball than Bob Knight."

Hard as that may seem sometimes, even to Davis.

"It's just exciting," he said, smiling. "It won't really sink in till the first game."

But the fans understood fully Friday night; this is a new era.

And the several thousand fans who started filing in at 11 p.m. wanted to show they're still Indiana fans.

"I'll be an IU fan and I've been an IU fan for years," said Charles Clark, who traces his Hoosiers roots to the 1950s. "It would have to be an awful drastic thing for me not to be an IU fan."

Not even Knight's firing could reach that level.

But what many of these fans wanted to illustrate at this event was that they still supported these Hoosiers -- regardless of Knight.

Holder, an annual attendee of the midnight practices, came to Bloomington with three other people and detected the changes almost instantly.

"The atmosphere feels a lot different," he said. "We got to go inside, before they closed the doors, and walked around on the court. Before, you usually got this feeling that you weren't allowed to do that, that you might bump into Coach."

While Holder and his friends managed to mingle with some of the players, namely freshmen guards A.J. Moye and Andre Owens, they also managed to bump into the coach.

"I was just telling this guy that Coach Davis needs to know we're behind him," said Kevin Morgan of Tipton, Ind. "Can you imagine being in his position, replacing a legend, replacing maybe the greatest basketball coach of all-time and we're not happy with 20-win seasons here? We expect Big Ten championships and national championships.

"As a matter of fact, we spoke with him and we told him that we were behind him 100 percent."

Other changes also were immediately apparent.

Davis, who accepted the Hoosiers' job two days after Knight was fired for violating Indiana's "zero-tolerance" policy, added 3-point shooting and dunk contests to the repertoire and also made the women's basketball team a first-time participant in the late-night event.

"I'm just being myself," Davis said. "We did some things for the kids. We want them to have fun tonight because (Saturday) at 4, it's going to be serious."

While most everybody wore the school colors and voiced their support, some fans admitted they preferred Knight's old-school practices better.

"We're actually hoping they come out and practice," said Mark Detweiler, head coach at Randolph Southern High School near Richmond, Ind. "We hope it's not just a circus or all this glitz. I kind of liked the practices because we want our players to see what it takes to play at this level."

Many, such as Clark, had mixed emotions that Knight was not inside Assembly Hall -- with his team.

"He's still my man," Clark said, pointing to his Knight sweatshirt. "I like Mike Davis, and I'll always be an IU fan. But I hated what happened to Knight."
 


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