By: Stephen McCollum

Practice makes, if not perfect, any skill look easier than it is. That’s why people keep watching any given art form—because of the illusion that any person could possibly do this thing made to look so easy.

Take Blackford basketball player Luke Brown. On the streets and in the media, people are talking about his pursuit of Damon Bailey’s all-time Indiana state high school scoring record of 3,134 points. Consider that by the time he finishes his career with the Bruins, Brown will have attempted in his personal shooting workouts—never mind team practice sessions—to score more than 1.5 million points. That fact is emblematic of the history of Hoosier Hysteria.

If you don’t know them already, meet Jim Ridenour and David Weddell. These two men have been working behind the scenes as rebounders for Brown’s personal shooting sessions—Ridenour since Brown was in seventh grade, and Weddell since the Browns and a bunch of Hoovers, led by octogenarian Jerry Hoover, moved to Blackford County two years ago.

Ridenour, who lives in Indianapolis, discovered the young Brown while running in a local gym. He first observed the ball-handling drills, then he went to a game at his grandchildren’s school where he saw Brown play in a game. 

“I came home and told my son that I’d just seen the best basketball player I’d ever seen,” said Ridenour. Hardly the demure type, Ridenour, 81, who still works two jobs and goes dancing several nights a week, met Luke’s dad, Ted, and asked if he could work with Luke. 

“I said I’ll do it one day a week,” he said. “Two weeks later I was doing it five days a week.” That’s how disciplined Brown is, says Ridenour, who never coached and whose homespun philosophy about shooting is that to be a great shooter you have to try 400-600 shots every morning and night. 

In the off-season, and less rigorously during the regular season, Brown and his rebounders stage morning and evening shooting sessions. Technology has brought a scientific dimension and precision analysis to the work. 

Weddell, who moved to Hartford City in 2007, is the owner of Perfect Lighting Solutions. The annals of Hoosier Hysteria will record that he lived in Starke County in northwest Indiana in 1967 when his father, Kermit, superintendent of schools hired Jerry Hoover as basketball coach. 

“So I’ve known the Hoovers for 50 years and when Don Hoover called me in 2017 to talk about the move here, I got to know Ted Brown, also a business owner, and he took me to watch Luke in an AAU game,” said Weddell. 

Soon Weddell and Ridenour met around Luke’s shooting regimen and the rest, you might say, is just more hysteria. Both men have spent hours rebounding—although given Brown’s shooting percentage, maybe there’s not as much running and chasing loose balls as for the average? However, there’s no doubting their dedication to Luke, his family, and the Bruin program, though. When Ridenour is in town, he stays at Weddell’s house. When he can’t be here, Weddell is on the scene with his tripod and phone loaded to the gills with basketball apps like Home Court. Some of the workouts are destined for the inboxes of college scouts. 

“He [Luke] is just disciplined. He never slacks off in practice,” said Ridenour. “One of my first trips here I was in a local store and a lady asked me if I was with the new boy in town. I said ‘Yes, and you will not believe how he’s going to change this town.’”

The next time you’re at a Bruins’ game and Luke Brown drains a three-pointer or seems to be scoring at will, stop and think about the hours and hours of shooting practice with Ridenour and Weddell under the basket. Think about Ridenour’s sole coaching lessons: “The only thing I do with him is clap my hands and say ‘focus,’ or ‘Luke, more arch.’”

Think about the archive of video piling up in Weddell’s computer because, he says, this could be a movie in the making. One thing we know, they can’t title it Hoosiers. 

One of Weddell’s employees, Laurie Byall, sums up what Ridenour was trying to tell the lady in the store checkout line about the hysteria about to consume the community: “This is taking Blackford County back to where it used to be by moving it forward to where it needs to be.”