Before widespread school district consolidation, most United States high schools were far smaller than their present day counterparts and during the first decades of the 20th century basketball quickly became the ideal interscholastic sport due to its modest equipment and personnel requirements. In the days before widespread television coverage of professional and college sports, the popularity of high school basketball was unrivaled in many parts of America.

Today virtually every high school in the United States fields a basketball team in varsity competition, and its popularity remains high, both in rural areas where they carry the identification of the entire community, as well as at some larger schools known for their basketball teams where many players go on to participate at higher levels of competition after graduation. In the 2003–04 season, 1,002,797 boys and girls represented their schools in interscholastic basketball competition, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. The states of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky are particularly well known for their residents’ devotion to high school basketball; the critically acclaimed film Hoosiers shows high school basketball’s depth of meaning to these rural communities. In fact, the term “March Madness” was first used to describe the Illinois high school basketball tournament.

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