Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
“Class C:” Basketball, Identity and Loss in Rural Montana
By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 2-19-08
 |
|
 | |
|
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.
Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.
Like to receive our print magazine, The New West? Click here for free subscription information.
Comments
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.
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.
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