Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

“Class C:” Basketball, Identity and Loss in Rural Montana

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 2-19-08

Class C: As their tiny hometowns fight to stay on the map, girls from across rural Montana compete for the state basketball title and a chance to bring home something worth celebrating. Montana native and basketball legend Phil Jackson brings insight and humor to the disappearing landscapes of his youth in a story that will change the way you see rural America.

On Saturday night the film “Class C” premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. The movie details the lives of a handful of Class C women basketball players in Montana, and as they play each other and make their way to the state championships we learn that basketball is more than a sport for them. It is not just a part of their identity; it is a part of their town’s identity. When they travel to games their hometowns shut down and folks follow the girls across the state to watch them play. At late night parties they discuss strategy and tournaments won in the past.

But the film is most striking for what it reveals about the loss of small towns and an agricultural way of life in Montana. There is a common sadness among these young women as they talk about their small hometowns. They are not melancholy that they are 255 miles from the nearest mall, but that towns across the Highline and in eastern Montana are shrinking in population and dying. Even their schools are being consolidated because they don’t have enough students to secure funding.

For many of the girls, these changes mean that they will not be able to continue living in the towns where they grew up as there are fewer jobs and opportunities.

A Twin Bridges player, whose father is the high school basketball coach, lives on her family’s small ranch. While basketball is central to her life, she worries most about the difficulties of ranching for her family. Residents with a great deal of money have moved into the area and are buying up property all around their small ranch. These purchases reduce the amount of pasture available in the summer for them to use for cattle, and the changes have put ranchers out of business in recent years.

In another small town, a player who is the daughter of a grocer begins to cry when she talks about the decline of their town. She talks about of her parents whom she adores, and worries about business at their grocery store.

These stories repeat with every dribble of the ball, clarifying the deeper story of small town losses and the way they are affecting a new generation. The girls’ concerns about the loss of family farms and ranches are not new, but they are intimately revealing in this movie.

There are other movies to see at the Big Sky Film festival that deal more directly with food, and perhaps the most interesting is “King Corn” about a couple of guys who plant genetically modified corn, use herbicides to grow it and then try to track their crop through the food system. Another film on Wednesday called “We Feed the World,” tells the story of hunger in a world of plenty.

But Class C is the sleeper food hit, relaying just how important agriculture is to small communities. It provides a new way of seeing farming through the lens of an upcoming generation, most of whom want to see their towns thrive. They love their towns and what those places have given them, and not because they are basketball stars and the center of social activity for all of their friends and neighbors, but out of love, and out of reverence. This is the deeper story of “Class C.” And like many of the towns the movie takes place in, basketball drives the deeper story. As an eloquent Phil Jackson says in the film, “basketball is more than metaphor. It is so much more than metaphor.”

For more information, visit www.classcmovie.com.

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