To Woodrow W. Jacobs it was a "big moment for me, a big moment for the community of Union Mills."

That "big moment" has lasted 50 years and remains visit in the memory of "Woody" Jacobs who played for the Union Mills Millers when they won the 1950 Michigan City sectional.                                                        

"I remember it as if it were yesterday. I’ll never forget it," he says.

It would be the only sectional the school would win before its merger with Clinton Township, Hanna and part of Wanatah to form South Central High School.

As it was then, it remains, as Jacobs calls it, "quite an accomplishment" considering the fact perennial powers Michigan City and LaPorte were in the same sectional. The fact those two titans might have had "down" years, as Jacobs notes, does not diminish the fete the Millers accomplished.

Looking back, the title may have been bigger than the town acknowledged at the time. "I don’t recall much of a celebration that Saturday night. We did have a school assembly on Monday morning which was attended by a sports writer from the LaPorte Herald-Argus. The school gave each player a trophy and Union Mills businessmen treated us to a Chicago Blackhawks’ hockey game."

Jacobs recalled the drama of that sectional title for the September issue of the American Legion’s national magazine, which used a picture of the team taken after the game ended. "It (the picture) was taken on the spur of the moment immediately after the game, which makes it so neat," he explains.

The coach, Charles P. Sanders, is wearing a hat in the picture, as he always did. It was is trade mark. The middle initial P was for Park, the name most people called him.

The championship game was itself amazing. The Millers and Michigan City were tied, 30-30, at the end of three quarters, making the outcome uncertain. That changed quickly as Jacobs recalled for Boxscore. "We caught fire and they didn’t. We outscored them 24-14 in the last eight minutes to win 54-44."

It was a time before players had roles such as "shooting guards"or "power forwards."

"Our guards were to bring the ball down the floor and pass it to the forwards and center to shoot. We could score on a fast break, but normally our job was limited to bringing the ball up court.

Tony Hadella, the smallest man on the team at 5 feet 8, was the team’s high scorer. Jacobs calls the 6 feet 1 Ray Rosenbaum "our best all-round player. He was very athletic and had a very good hook shot."

A southpaw, he attended Purdue University on a baseball scholarship.

The team’s success came despite the fact its own gym was small, "the Cracker Box," Jacobs says it was called. "You could barely arch a shot without the ball hitting the ceiling. It was just small with a short floor and seats on two sides. It might have had 500 seats if that many."

Within two years after the sectional title a a new, and bigger, gymnasium, was built at Union Mills.

Basketball, as in all small Hoosier communities, was big at Union Mills at mid-century, but not big enough to get farm youths out of doing farm chores. Jacobs lived in town, but said most of the players had to help with the milking and other do other work after school, forcing the team to practice at night.

Chores still had to be done before the team could prepare to meet Hammond in the regional. The team, as Jacobs notes, had a let down after the euphoria of the sectional, and lost the game at the Hammond Civic Center, 73-40.

The Millers, however, had done what only one other county school (Rolling Prairie in 1941) had done. And that was to win the sectional.

It would be an achievement that would live a life time for Jacobs and his teammates.

A few months later, the Union Mills players would don different kinds of uniforms and win the county baseball tournament to cap the schools most memorable athletic season. It would be a year to remember beyond the millenium.