DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

More than twenty years have passed since I played my final game as a NCAA Division II basketball player. Though I moved on from sport a long time ago, certain choices continue to haunt me. What if I'd taken my training more seriously in high school and in college. 

I was a big kid growing up, and I'd began getting letters from colleges the moment I started playing AAU basketball for a traveling team. I assumed Tobacco Road was my destiny. Those early experiences fed my personal hoop dreams and led me to believe that a future in basketball was inevitable. After signing my letter of intent and moving on to college, my somewhat respectable high school career never blossomed. I ended up having at best a mediocre college career and felt like a failure as a player.

​Though I continued playing, by the end of my sophomore year in college, I found myself resigning my hoop dreams to the reality of my limited prospects as a player, and I began to focus my energy into my studies and my future as an educator. Nevertheless, my identity as a student-athlete and my longing for greatness in competition didn't disappear. There were always the nagging what-ifs. What if transferred schools? What if I trained harder? 

I'm #30, blocking the shot from our conference player of the year as a high school junior.

The  news of my letter of intent.

Here I am snatching a rebound from two players. This is also from my junior year.

My college team photo

I did not discover my passion for film and filmmaking until late in life. After teaching for seven years, I returned to graduate school in 2006 at NC State for English and Film Studies. My advanced studies in film reignited my passion for teaching, especially in the area of media literacy, and those studies led to my first film, TEACHER OF THE YEAR (2017), which I co-directed with a former teacher and fellow filmmaking friend, Jason Korreck. But this basketball film project was in my head long before I even considered my first film.

These photos are from the 20th anniversary event for HOOP DREAMS,  Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

In 1998, the year before I began teaching back home, I saw HOOP DREAMS (1994) while I was in graduate school for education, and the memories of playing in college all came flooding back. To say that HOOP DREAMS had a profound influence on me would be an understatement. The movie was all I thought about for some time. I didn't know a documentary could have that sort of impact on a person. Like Arthur Agee and William Gates, I played at elite prep camps and in tournaments against future hall-of-fame players. Rubbing shoulders with greatness, playing in stadiums for cheering crowds, getting recruiting from letters from coaches we see on television gives players the belief that their gifts are special and will take them to next level. I immediately wondered, what happened to those guys? Where are they now? The internet wasn't what it is now, so those questions were more difficult to answer. But I found myself looking for their stories.

Since they didn't make it to the NBA, I wondered if they secretly felt similar to how I felt. Were they also nagged by the what-ifs? If I felt these things as a mediocre player from a small college, I wondered what the feeling was like for an athlete that attended an elite Tobacco Road school where I once imagined playing? To what extent were they able to transform their what ifs into a what now? And what does their what now actually look like? That question, perhaps more than any other, led me to this film project.

With this film, it is my sincere hope that audiences will see former athletes in a new light and that current and former student-athletes will reimagine what what success can look like.