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December 2013

SL Interview: Not Your Dad’s “Hoosiers.” Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart Look at Indiana HS Hoops

la84_SL_121013_MedoraIn November of 2009, New York Times reporter John Branch traveled to the tiny hamlet of Medora, Indiana (population: about 500 people), located about 80 miles south of Indianapolis. Medora is home to the nation’s largest covered bridge, but amidst the shuttered plastic factories and brick plants Branch could find few signs of the Rockwellian idyll of small-town rural life.

“There is little to cheer but for the high school basketball team,” Branch wrote, only to signal yet another death knell: The basketball team “does not win.” The previous season, the Hornets finished 0-22.

Branch, who last year won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for “Snow Fall,” his multi-media account of skiers killed in an avalanche, depicted a bleak and depleted town, with a high poverty rate and rampant drug use. Medora, he suggested, “could be this generation’s anti-Hoosiers,” a reference to the 1986 film about the real-life Milan High basketball team that won the state championship in the mid-1950s.

Branch’s article served as inspiration, and foil, for filmmakers Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart. After reading Branch’s story, they decided that Medora and its high school basketball team deserved a deeper examination. They moved to neighboring Seymour, embedded themselves with the team for six months during the 2010-11 season, and filmed the interaction between the players, their parents, and their coach.

After initial filming Cohn and Rothbart raised over $60,000 on Kickstarter to pay the costs of editing the film. Cohn spent the next year shaping 600 hours of footage into an intimate, moving documentary, with the misadventures of the basketball team serving as a metaphor for the crumbling, yet resilient small town. (The film’s executive producers include actors Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi.)

“Medora” premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and it has been making the rounds of the festival circuit ever since. “Medora” will air on PBS in the spring of 2014 as part of the Independent Lens documentary series.

Cohn and Rothbart are longtime collaborators; they are Midwesterners by birth — they both grew up in Michigan — and basketball junkies for life. Rothbart is the editor and publisher of Found Magazine  and the author of “My Heart Is an Idiot” and “The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas.” His stories have aired on “This American Life.” Cohn is a screenwriter and documentary filmmaker who is a senior editor of Found Magazine. He is creative director for 21 Balloon Productions.

SportsLetter interviewed Cohn and Rothbart while they were in Indiana to screen the film there. (Rothbart was only available to answer the first question.)

–David Davis

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LA84 Foundation Confronts Concussions In Youth Football

LA84_News_FootballGuidelinesCover_250x325.jpgLOS ANGELES (December 2, 2013) – With national concern on the rise over the dangers of brain injuries in football and youth sports more generally, the LA84 Foundation has adopted new safety guidelines based on collaboration with medical experts and youth football administrators. The Foundation, which has provided $600,000 in grants to 58 youth football programs across Southern California since 2010, will now give preference to grant proposals from organizations that adhere to these standards.

The new guidelines will favor organizations that delay tackle football until eight years of age, while offering flag football for younger children.  All tackle coaches will be expected to receive training in tackling techniques designed to reduce head trauma. Grant recipients also will agree to limit contact drills during practices, particularly player-on-player full-contact drills. Dangerous training practices, such as full speed head-on blocking or tackling drills, are expressly prohibited.

The guidelines also call on football programs to provide trained safety monitors to help identify concussions and other injuries immediately during practices, and ensure that medics are present at all games.

In creating these guidelines, the Foundation sought the direction of leading scholars in the field, along with sports officials and administrators who have a firsthand vantage point in the debate. The research recognizes that far more concussions occur than are diagnosed among youth sports participants, and that children’s brains are more vulnerable to injury than those of adults.

“Our organization is concerned with the safety of young athletes,” said Anita L. DeFrantz, President of the LA84 Foundation.  “We are pleased to lead in this area and collaborate with others to work on effective solutions to the serious and growing problem of brain trauma in sports.”

“Football has the highest reported concussion rate of any high school sport, and the act of tackling is responsible for more than 80% of injuries in the sport,” said Dr. Robert Cantu, a leading expert on concussions in contact sports, during his keynote speech at an LA84 Foundation conference on youth football earlier this year.  “We want kids to play these sports, but we definitely want them to be played in a safer manner than they are today.”

Programs that demonstrate compliance with the LA84 Foundation’s new guidelines will be eligible to receive funding to train coaches in safer-tackling techniques, hire qualified medical personnel for games and to purchase tackling dummies and other equipment that can be used in practice as an alternative to player-on-player contact.

While the LA84 Foundation recognizes the need for greater research and data on head trauma in youth sports, the organization believes that strong guidelines are needed now to protect young athletes.  “Changing the youth football culture may take time, but as a leading advocate for and supporter of youth sports, the LA84 Foundation is taking important steps to endorse best practices that protect the safety of young athletes,” DeFrantz said. “We are thankful for the cooperation of youth football organizations that share our commitment to finding ways to protect children when they participate in the sport.”

“The recent revelations about the brain injuries and memory problems of former NFL players like Tony Dorsett and Brett Favre serve as a fresh reminder that football presents many risks,” said Patrick Escobar, LA84 Foundation Vice President of Grants and Programs. “In order to make youth football safer, we need to keep our line of communication open with programs that want to improve their standards. We believe that our grant guidelines will allow us to remain involved with these football programs while influencing the way that they operate over time.”

In addition to implementing the grant guidelines, the LA84 Foundation will work for improvements in two important areas— referee enforcement of rules designed to protect player safety, and education of parents and coaches on the importance of standards that protect the long-term health of their players.

“We believe that educating and monitoring referees in youth football organizations will be critical to improving player safety,” said Escobar. “It’s important that they know and enforce standards that are tailored for each age level.”

Go to the LA84 website to read the 2013 LA84 Foundation Youth Football Grant Guidelines.

About the LA84 Foundation
The LA84 Foundation was established to manage Southern California’s share of the surplus from the successful 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The Foundation received an endowment of $93 million.  Since it began operations in 1985, it has invested $214 million in sports programs serving more than 3 million youth in the eight Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Imperial, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Ventura. It is headquartered in the historic Britt House near Downtown Los Angeles where it houses the world’s premier sports library and meeting facilities. The Foundation provides grants to youth sports organizations, manages programs, including a coaching education program, and convenes numerous forums for the exploration of the most pressing issues in sport. For more information, please visit www.la84.org.