Many Cloverdale residents locked up their homes and businesses early Saturday night to watch the Cloverdale High School varsity basketball team play for the Sectional Championship.
“We have been blessed with the best fans in the state the past four years,” Cooper Neese, senior basketball player and Butler University commit, said. “They’ve blessed me with the opportunity to put on the Cloverdale uniform, so it is very satisfying to bring them so much enjoyment.”
Neese is a popular face around the Cloverdale community. Whether it’s leaving school, shopping at the grocery store or warming up for a game, people always go out of their way to say hello to the star player.
“Hearing people tell me how much fun they have watching me is a very humbling experience,” Neese said. “They’ve given me the opportunity to succeed, so it feels great to give them so much enjoyment.”
Neese’s celebrity status around Cloverdale made Saturday night’s game that much more special. The Cloverdale faithful does not know when his last game in the green and white will be, so they are treating every game like it is his last.
Neese did not disappoint. He showed off Steph Curry-like range pulling up from beyond the NBA three-point line on multiple occasions on his way to 19 points and a victory. A second-half floater from the middle of the paint put him seventh all-time in scoring in Indiana High School basketball history.
The team now moves on to the Regional semi-finals this upcoming weekend against Northeastern. Cloverdale has not won a Regional Championship since 1983, where Neese’s father, Jerry, was the star player of the team.
“Winning three straight sectionals is one of my biggest accomplishes of my life,” Neese said. “But we have completely shifted our focus on to Regionals.”
For two hours the over 600 residents of Cloverdale that attended the game celebrated. Cloverdale has a population of barely over 2,000, so nearly a third of the town attended the high school basketball game.
You will not find many social venues in Cloverdale compared to most towns, in fact, there is only one movie theater in all of Putnam County, and it is a two screen theater in downtown Greencastle. The main attraction of this town is Neese and their high school basketball team.
“It’s Indiana,” Patrick Rady, head coach of the Cloverdale basketball team, said. “We can’t express how grateful we are that the community supports us so well. We call our crowd the sixth man and during big games it is truly is a sixth man.”
I decided to experience the town’s love for basketball myself. I drove to Casey’s General Store in Cloverdale and asked the women working the cash register if she caught the game on Saturday. Without hesitation, she pulled the ticket to the game out of her pocket. Even walking back out to my car, I passed two more men talking about their Regional matchup.
Cloverdale is a town where every fifth person lives under the poverty line. A town with vacant stores and buildings at every turn. But a town with a basketball team.
When Neese was asked what a Regional Championship would mean to Cloverdale, it took him a few extra seconds to respond. All he could do was smile. Finally, he broke the silence, and said, “They deserve one.”
