“We’ve Got A Team!” captures Southridge Raiders’ epic back-to-back runs to the Final Four

Former player Todd Jochem’s new written history, We’ve Got A Team!, captures Hoosier Hysteria in Dubois County

In the mid-1980s, a team from a small corner of southern Indiana did something its community still talks about: the Southridge Raiders went to the Final Four two years running, in 1985 and 1986, during the single-class era when one tournament put every school in the state on the same floor. Now one of the players from those teams has written the full story down.

We’ve Got A Team! The Story of the Duncan Brothers and the Legacy of Hoosier Hysteria, by Todd Jochem, Ph.D., releases on Amazon on July 1st. Jochem, a starting forward on the 1985 and 1986 squads, spent the better part of a year reconstructing those seasons game by game — and the result is part history, part memoir, and part community scrapbook. The timing is deliberate: the book arrives just past the 40th anniversary of that 1986 Final Four run, and just ahead of Huntingburg Memorial Gym’s 75th anniversary this fall.

The book draws on interviews with more than 50 former players, coaches, classmates, opponents, broadcasters, and community members, as well as more than 500 contemporaneous newspaper articles, broadcast transcripts, scouting reports, and 40-year-old scorebooks. The game accounts are written entirely from the reporting of the era, with no later statistics or hindsight added. Separate, clearly marked reflection sections let players, coaches, and the author look back from a distance.

But the book starts long before the Final Fours. Most of these players grew up together, learning the game on playground blacktops, in driveways, and in grade-school gyms years before they ever pulled on a Raider jersey. They were teammates by grade school and friends well before that, and by the time they reached high school that familiarity had become something no roster sheet could capture — a sense of where the next pass was going before it was thrown. Southridge basketball wasn’t built in a season. It was built over a childhood.

At the center of it all are head coach Gary Duncan, the players the town came to call the “Duncan Brothers,” and Huntingburg Memorial Gym — the “Big Gym” — which the community dug out of the ground and built for itself. On winter nights, that gym filled with the same families, neighbors, and businesses that had watched these boys grow up. The team and the town were never really separate. When the Raiders made their runs, it wasn’t just a team going to the Final Four — it was a whole community going with them.

The foreword is written by Denny Spinner, the longtime “Voice of the Raiders” on WBDC and later mayor of Huntingburg. The title comes from a moment he describes from press row: during a fourth-quarter timeout at the 1986 Semi-State in Terre Haute, the cheerleaders and the Raider crowd built a cheer that shook Hulman Center and carried an exhausted team back to the State Finals.

“This isn’t really my story — it’s ours,” Jochem said. “Fifty-some people opened up their memories so we could get it down before it slipped away. I wrote it for the guys I played with, for the town that packed that gym night after night, and for the families whose names are still on those rosters two and three generations later. These stories still matter — maybe more now than ever.”

We’ve Got A Team! releases in paperback on Amazon July 1st, with a hardcover edition also available. The book is published by Jochem Family Press.

Jochem grew up in Huntingburg and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and build a career in robotics and technology. We’ve Got A Team! is his third book.