During October, thousands of students will be playing on soccer fields around Indiana, looking to capture a sectional title. Parents and grandparents will bring folding chairs, classmates will fill the stands and everyone will cheer for their favorite team.

62 years ago, the Dragons traveled 9.6 miles down State Road 10 to play CMA in the first high school match in Indiana.

In 1963, Argos athletic director/basketball coach Ralph Powell was looking for a fall sport to use as conditioning for his team. He had visited Culver Military Academy earlier to watch its intramural soccer program.

“Not only is soccer a good conditioner for basketball because of its bursts of speed and stop-and-go motions, but many of the defensive moves are the same in both sports,” Powell told the Culver Alumnus magazine. “I’m willing to give up an hour and 15 minutes of basketball practice in October in order to play soccer. After 5 p.m., we play basketball.”

That led Powell and CMA athletic director Chester Marshall, who was also the basketball coach, to agree to a five-game series in September and October. Those became the first interscholastic soccer matches in state history.

In building up to the historic event, the September 18 issue of the Argos Reflector ran a team photo and an article giving a brief description of soccer for the uninitiated:

“Soccer, the most widely played of all international team sports, is a game in which the ball is moved up and down a field and scoring is accomplished by manipulating the ball with the feet. Use of hands is prohibited except for the goalkeeper. Soccer is a prominent sport in many parts of the United States. However, it has never been promoted in Indiana.”

Some familiar last names pop out of the caption that accompanies the photo: Hagan, Rice, Snyder, Hand, Umbaugh, VanDerWeele, Nifong, Weidner and Kline – to name a few.

To help grow the game, Powell and Marshall also conducted a joint meeting at Argos to talk with other high school officials who might be interested in playing soccer. When Argos and CMA squared off in the last game of the season two days later, The Vedette (CMA’s student newspaper) said three area coaches were present to watch. CMA won, 1-0, in what CMA coach Eric Anderson called “the best of all year.”

The series ended with CMA winning four and one game finishing in a draw. CMA did have the upper hand, having offered an intramural program since 1927, thanks to its international student population. The team that played Argos was comprised of all-stars from that program. And, according to an autumn 1963 article in the Culver Alumnus, since many of the CMA players were from Mexico or Latin America, they shouted instructions to each other in Spanish to confuse the Argos players.

As more schools added soccer to their fall sports list, Argos and CMA continued to play a home-and-home series. They were also founding members of the Northern Indiana Soccer Conference. And the CMA vs. Argos game still gets circled on everyone’s calendar. The rivalry is still that intense 60 years later. This year’s game is September 28 at Argos.

Now, there is a three-class IHSAA soccer tournament with more than 318 boys teams and 280 girls teams participating each season.

And, to think, it all started with a short bus ride down State Road 10 in 1963.

Jan Garrison has covered his fair share of Argos-CMA soccer matches while at The Pilot-News from 1977-1987 and as Culver Academies assistant director of publications from 2000-2021. A big research assist was offered by Jeff Kenney, the director of the Culver Academies Museum & Gift Shop.