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The history of Scottsburg cannot be told without basketball, because this is Indiana and that’s one of those towns where some kids grow up dreaming of wearing the purple-and-gold of royalty and playing for a state championship. You know, like the 1989 girls starring IndyStar Miss Basketball winner Renee Westmoreland, or the 2024 boys starring 6-9 forward Wyatt Zellers. He calls the high-scoring Westmoreland by another name: Aunt Renee.
This is a story of families and legacies, and it cannot be told without the straight lines of genealogy and the Pennsylvania Railroad that was laid here in 1872, around which a town was born. It cannot be told without the arrival of I-65 in 1961, connecting Scottsburg to Louisville 30 miles to the south, and eventually forming a straight line 80 miles north to Indianapolis and beyond.
Those are the lines that formed Scottsburg, straight like a midcourt stripe, but do you hear that noise in the background? Those are the sounds of trumpets and trombones, drums and clarinets and an alto sax. Scottsburg isn’t just a basketball town, you see. This is a band town.
And when Scottsburg plays South Bend St. Joseph for the IHSAA Class 3A state championship Saturday in Gainbridge Fieldhouse, when Wyatt Zellers and the boys seek a state title to match the one claimed 35 years ago by a team led by his Aunt Renee and point guard Carla Westmoreland – Wyatt calls her “Mom” – the pep band will be there too.
And if you have time for just one story about Scottsburg, about that basketball town of about 7,000 in our basketball state of 6.8 million, let this be the story.
Can't play for state without pep band!
They are coming from the factory and the rectory, from an attorney’s office and from high school English class. When this game is done, the bass player will get his guitar and return to his job in wealth management in Carmel. When the school year is done, the trumpet player will get his diploma and head to IU Southeast in New Albany.
The saxophone player? He’d better hurry back to Scottsburg, because he’s expected in court.
He’s a judge.
This is the crew that will represent the pride of Scottsburg, the Band of Warriors, thanks to a twist of scheduling fate. Basketball state championship weekend falls during spring break at Scottsburg. Some kids in the pep band are away with families, while a tri-state event in Kentucky will claim its percussion section, bass guitar player and both band directors. The pep band’s only tuba player and one of the flutists are cheerleaders, and they’ll be supporting the basketball team that way.
Add it up – well, subtract it down – and the pep band was gutted. No drums, no guitar, no tuba? No pep band at the Class 3A title game. Only, that wouldn’t do. Not for a group with more history even than a boys basketball program with 24 sectional championships, or a girls basketball program once led by legendary Donna Cheatham, who won 379 games from 1972-94 and took this little bitty town – population then: 5,300 – on a 1989 joyride to the Indiana single-class championship.
But the band is even bigger in Scottsburg, taking off in the early 1970s under legendary directors Kris Knauer and Bill Henderson, who passed the baton to Tim Johnston in 1994, who passed it to Curtis Turner in 2019. The Band of Warriors has qualified for the Indiana State School Music Association (ISSMA) state finals 30 times in the last 41 years, a preposterous number that doesn’t fit what seems possible for a town this size – and doesn’t fit on the banner, either.
The Scottsburg gym, a fun little joint called the “Pressure Cooker,” has banners honoring its basketball tradition, but the gaudiest banner hanging from the rafters celebrates the Band of Warriors, whose trips to the ISSMA marching band state finals are listed in horizontal rows that go seven deep – Row 1: 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 – before dropping down, row after row. The fourth row, with state finals appearances from 2007-17, filled the banner. When the Band of Warriors reached the ISSMA finals again in 2018 and ’22, the school shoehorned those dates into an empty spot on the banner, near the top righthand corner.
The band was, and still is, the show in Scottsburg. Remember Renee Westmoreland, Miss Basketball in 1989? She was a bass drummer. Her sister, Carla? Wyatt Zellers' mom? She played the mellophone.
“When I was growing up, there were 180 kids in the marching band,” says Trent Cowles, Scottsburg class of 1987, the money manager from Carmel and a guitarist who once toured the country with John David Webster’s Christian rock band. “We were a school of only about 800 – it was a very big, loud band.”
Still is. Earlier this year Scottsburg chose its game against rival Austin in November to hold its annual pep band alumni night. Most games, the pep band has 30 or 40 members and fits comfortably into one section of the Pressure Cooker. On this night the combination school-and-alumni band had more than 100 members, and spilled over into the aisles.
“Usually we have five or six in the trumpet section,” says Scottsburg senior Noah Phillips, a trumpet player headed to IU Southeast, where he still study music with the dream of following Knauer, Henderson, Johnston and Turner as the high school band director. “That night it was 25 or 30. You should have heard it when we played ‘Seven Nation Army.’ That’s a very, very trumpet-heavy song, and it was like blowing your face off.”
Four months later, the Scottsburg boys basketball team was making a run to the state title game. It was during semistate at Seymour, no room for pep bands there, and sometime between the Warriors’ victories against Evansville Bosse and Guerin Catholic it dawned on Noah Phillips, cheering from the student section:
This team is going to the 3A title game. And the pep band won’t be ready.
And that’s not OK.
Phillips went looking for his band director, Curtis Turner, in another part of the Scottsburg crowd.
Pastor on trumpet, custodian on drums
“What are we going to do?”
That’s what Noah Phillips is asking his band director, and Curtis Turner doesn’t know. This is a musical story, but the math doesn’t work: No drums plus no tuba plus no pep band director equal no pep band. Turner didn’t know the alumni would be an option until Scottsburg athletic director Jamie Lowry asked the IHSAA for relief, and the IHSAA gave the perfect response: There’s room for a 40-person pep band. Fill it any way you like. All students, all alumni, or some combination.
Turner reached out to the judge of Indiana’s 6 th Judicial Circuit Court, Jason Mount. A 1989 graduate and drum major for the Band of Warriors, Mount’s like so many around Scottsburg: a music lifer. He gives sax lessons in his spare time, plays every year on alumni night and is hoping a spot opens up in the saxophone section of the IU Southeast concert band. Mount originally went to Ball State to study music, and was 2½ years into the program when he realized his high school band director, Knauer, had given him good advice:
Make law your career, and music your hobby.
“Second-best advice I ever got,” says Mount, who was elected Scott County prosecutor in 2005 and stayed in that role until becoming a Scott County Circuit Court judge in 2017.
The best advice?
“I was 15,” he says, and he’s starting to laugh because he knows what’s coming. “My father and I were driving past an old country farmhouse. Dad said, ‘That’s Mr. Watterson’s house. He has a daughter about your age. You ought to see if she’s dating anybody.”
Turns out, Shannon Watterson – a year younger than Mount – was in the band’s color guard. Jason asked her out. Shannon said yes. They’ve been married 27 years and have four adult children.
“I asked her out in that music room,” Mount says, and here comes another chuckle. “You could say the Scottsburg band has been a major influence in my life.”
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Mount has been the pep band’s director in a pinch, when Turner and assistant Jacob Ward are away. He knows everyone around these parts, and is known to wear the occasional purple-and-gold tie under his robe on the bench at the Scott County Courthouse. Mount went to Facebook to spread the word about the pep band needing help, and here they came:
Troy Alexander, class of 1991, from the Cerrowire copper wire factory in Crothersville, and Zach Bane (class of 1998), a broadband installer in Scottsburg; they play the trombone. Cowles (1987) on the bass guitar and Mount (1989) on the alto sax. Jonathan Wimp (1996), a worship pastor in Cincinnati, plays the trumpet. Kelsea Hall (2014), an attorney near Louisville, and her husband Mickey (2015), a music instructor at Jeffersonville High; that’ll be Kelsea on the clarinet and Mickey on the drums alongside Logan Campbell (2016), a local maintenance technician. Jessie Silakowski-Cope (2018), a freelance photographer in Crothersville, will be on baritone, surrounded by a handful of recent Scottsburg alums, now in college, also coming back to answer their alma mater’s call.
In a matter of days, Mount had found 15 alumni to join the 15 or so current students available. The Scottsburg pep band will be at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on Saturday night, ranging in age from 15 to 55.
“No time to practice together,” says Cowles, noting alums are coming from Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. “We’ll just show up and play.”
Like they were born to do in Scottsburg, a band town with a pretty good basketball team.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar .
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Doyel: Scottsburg's pep band features a pastor on trumpet, custodian on drums, judge on sax
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