MEDORA, Film by FOUND Magazine’s Davy Rothbart, Premieres in Denver November 12

Medora, Indiana, is one of those tiny, rural towns where the factories have shut down, drugs have moved in, and things have grown dire. Its high school boys’ basketball team, the Medora Hornets, has also suffered, losing games by outrageous margins, and often finishing the season without a single win. It’s no surprise that a 2009 New York Times article about the Hornets’ struggles and the dwindling town of Medora would captivate the two of us — lifelong friends who met on a basketball court in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is surrounded by decaying Rust Belt factory and farm towns itself, just a few hours north of Medora.

As founders and editors of FOUND Magazine, which collects notes and letters plucked up off the ground and the street, and frequent contributors to public radio’s This American Life and the McSweeney’s DVD series Wholphin, we’ve always been fascinated by other people’s stories. What would it be like, we wondered, to live in a state where basketball means everything and play for a team that never wins? And what is lost when our country’s small towns fade off the map?

The day after reading the New York Times piece, the two of us drove from Ann Arbor down to Medora to check out the town with our own eyes. We met the head coach and several players, and spent a couple of hours wandering around town (it didn’t take long—the town is tiny). We were struck by Medora’s eerie, beautiful silence and stillness, and by the kindness and openness of the people we met. It felt like we’d traversed not only a couple of hundred miles south but also a couple of decades back in time. At the end of the night, standing in a gentle snow on empty Main Street, we looked at each other, and agreed: As passionate basketball fans, documentary film junkies, and proud Midwesterners, a movie about Medora was the one we were born to make.

The next fall, with the blessing of Medora High School and the local community, we began to document a year in the life of several Medora basketball players and coaches, following their struggles and triumphs on and off the court. We met Rusty Rogers, a stoic 6’5” center who’d been left virtually homeless, due to his mom’s problems with alcohol, and now lived in public housing with his best friend, Zack Fish, Medora’s point guard, with whom, by necessity, he shared a twin bed. The team’s shooting guard, Dylan McSoley, wrestled with whether or not to make contact with his dad, a man he’d never met who lived in the next town over. Robby Armstrong, a farmer’s son, strived to be the first in his family to complete high school, with dreams of going to college, while Chaz Cowles, arrested on a gun charge, did his best to stay out of trouble with the law.

Tags: Davy rothbart, Medora

Category: Local News