Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

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

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 2-19-08

	Caption: 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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Gee, the smallish town near where I grew up now has something like 200,000 people. There are huge soccer fields, with giant halogen lights where we used to walk though pecan groves to a fishing hole on Aldridge Creek (which was concreted in the late 70's). The places where we caught snakes and hunted crawdads in an old springhouse are in the yard of a 4000 square foot house, one of thousands. There's a new Target planned for the horse barns and pastures where I worked as a horseshoer's gofer when I was fourteen. New highways? Shoot yeah. From Memphis to Atlanta, man, all that ag land just sitting there waiting to be condemned and developed.

Travel around southern California. Visit Atlanta. Talk to the people in their seventies who were born in Mexico City or Tijuana.

Count your blessings even if you have not quite grasped them yet.

And guaranteed jobs in the same town you grew up in? Sounds like the Communist Worker's Paradise, for sure.

I don't mean to be harsh- I have not seen the documentary, and I want to, and I will. But I get so weary of nostalgia for some lost ideal that never was, or was for only a brief time, based on something like a market that was bound to adjust itself to the reality, of say, rainfall or soils or grain demands, or corporate ag takeovers or mechanization.

Spoken like a true outta stater, hal. Sorry that you're so "weary". Maybe you should'a stayed down south and tried to stop the growth there! Just a thought. Montana's growth is ugly and incompatible with our landscape.

I've lived in Montana since 1989. Before that I lived in my native state of Alabama, then north Florida and Louisiana. I just call it like I see it, and yes, I've seen a lot of loss, a lot of the places I've loved most are lost under asphalt. That colors my perspective, I know. In stater, outa stater, none of that makes much difference to me - I'm more interested in what a person's experience is. I've met people born in Montana who seem like they'd like the place better if it all looked like Dallas. And I've met people from Dallas who love Montana and its wild places and isolated towns, and wouldn't change it for the world. And I've met a huge number of Montanans, native born or not, who love the place as much as I do.

I just think that, if one is going to burst into tears about declining populations, one ought to travel to places with great big booming populations and take a look at what that entails. That is all I said, and I'd think that even if I were born in Calcutta.

Just saw the film and it profoundly affected me, although I did not grow up in rural Montana. The film brought to the forefront the plight of the rural community to not just thrive, but to simply survive. Rural communities are where our true moral values, work ethics, and strengths originated ... when we lose that base, then we lose that which has made our country the envy of the world.

Hal, would you burst into tears if you saw the land that your great grandfathers homesteaded wither into a wasteland of CRP and then be sold to highest bidder. I can trace my wife's family farm back to the mid 1800's. I have a dresser in my basement that her great great grandfather bought new in Minneapolis and brought with him to the homestead west of Big Sandy.

That same farm was taken over by son after son until the last one died and left his childless, 58 year old wife with 28,000 acres to farm for herself. Once that farm is sold, every one left alive in her family will have suffered a great loss that I truly doubt you will ever endure.

Without the game of basketball, the kids of our communities would be lost. It is the one thing that keeps them sane when their world, their life, and their hopes are being sold at auction. It is not nostalgia, but the very fabric that we are made of.

Don't tell me how good I have it, by telling me how bad it is every where else in the world. We know how good it is here, and what kind of sacrafices it takes to make a life in this state. Class C wasn't made to be a sob story but to tell a story. Watch the movie and learn.

Montana is the last best place so tell all of your out of state friends that is sucks.

NO VACANCY