The Aces Plane Crash of Nineteen Seventy-Seven
Near Evansville, Indiana
On the night of December thirteenth, nineteen seventy-seven, the University of Evansville Purple Aces basketball team boarded a chartered Douglas DC-three for a flight to Nashville, Tennessee, where they were scheduled to play Middle Tennessee State the following evening. The plane took off from Dress Regional Airport in icy conditions shortly after nine o'clock. It climbed a few hundred feet, banked, stalled, and crashed.
Twenty-nine people died, the entire active roster of the basketball team, the coaching staff including head coach Bobby Watson, university administrators, and crew members. One player who had stayed home injured survived. The University of Evansville, a small private institution with deep roots in the United Methodist tradition, was devastated.
An entire athletic program was gone. Families across the city and across Indiana lost sons and husbands and friends. The university held a memorial service in Roberts Stadium that drew thousands.
What happened next is a testament to the particularity of small-city grief and institutional determination. The university did not abandon basketball. Within weeks, coach Dick Walters was brought in to rebuild the program from nothing.
He recruited a new team of freshmen and walk-ons who played their first season, nineteen seventy-seven to nineteen seventy-eight, having known each other for only a matter of weeks. They lost most of their games. But they played.
Four years later, in the nineteen eighty-one to eighty-two season, the University of Evansville basketball program reached the NCAA Division One tournament for the first time. The players who accomplished that were not the players who died, but they carried the weight of what had happened before them.
