In a state where high school basketball is king, there is also a flip side. The documentary "Medora" focuses on the worst high school basketball team in the state of Indiana, a tiny school whose student body only yields about 50 boys, of whom eight play on the basketball team.
Medora is a small, depressed town in southern Indiana, where drug use is rampant and employment is scarce. And its boys basketball team finished 0-22 the previous year. Undersized and understaffed, the team can't compete with the larger consolidated schools — from which several school districts, each probably at least of a similar size to Medora, combined into a larger district. With pools of hundreds of boys from whom to choose, their rosters regularly overwhelm and smother the outmatched Medora squad.
Filmmakers Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart follow the team, its players and coach (who by day, and sometimes night, is a police officer) individually, gathering their backstories and living situations. One player has behavior problems and is booted from the team; we see the coach worry about the player because, as they both said, basketball was keeping him out of trouble to begin with. Losing it means he either straightens himself out or finds even greater trouble.
Another kid's mother has an alcohol problem, and he's one of the lucky ones because it means he has a role model of some type, even if it's a model for what not to be. He takes her story to heart, refusing to drink at a party despite some really heavy pressure from a teammate.
And none of them has any idea how to win. We see them coming close, only to panic late and miss game-clinching free throws or turn the ball over. As a team, they are unable to break a press. They continue to lose, each defeat more heartbreaking and demoralizing than the next, whether they lose by 40 points or four.
But the team continues to work hard and press on, finding opportunities for small victories and capitalizing on them.
"Medora" is one of those films you call a triumph of the human spirit not because its subjects succeed against all odds but because they find any measure of success at all. "Medora" is harrowing, heartbreaking and uplifting all at the same time — a tremendous documentary, the anti-"Hoop Dreams," where athletes are counting on basketball not to provide them fame and fortune but to simply give them a reason to be hopeful about something.