Was the Coach really a middle-aged man?

No. The real Coach of the championship team, Coach Marvin Wood, was only 26 when Milan won the title. His counterpart in the movie Hoosiers, Coach Norman Dale, was Hoosiers Hickory to help recapture the
movie's underdog story.played by Gene Hackman who was 55 when the movie was being filmed. Screenwriter Angelo Pizzo said the following about keeping the Coach in the movie the same age as his real life counterpart, "I wrote it that way and the movie didn't work. If he had failed, he still had the rest of his life. I went back and made the character older, a guy with a last chance." At the time of the actual championship, Coach Marvin Wood had been a recent graduate of Butler University, where he played both baseball and basketball. At Butler, Marvin played on two Hoosier Classic championship teams (1947-48 and 1948-49) when Butler defeated both Indiana and Purdue in the same tournament.