We will start with a spoiler alert for the Netflix series “Last Chance U.: Basketball,” starring the Huskies of East Los Angeles College during the 2019-20 season. But it’s not really a spoiler since it’s public record: The Huskies didn’t win a state community college championship last spring, but neither did anyone else.
“I tell everybody, there’s (normally) a hundred schools and there’s only one team that doesn’t lose in the playoffs,” ELAC coach John Mosley said in a phone conversation this week. “And I’ll tell them this: We didn’t.”
The extenuating circ*mstances by now should be obvious. The California Community College Elite Eight would have taken place one year ago this week, but that was the week all of sports (and most of society, period) went into COVID-19 lockdown, and the state tournament was scrubbed before it began.
East L.A., which was 29-1 with a 25-game winning streak after advancing through the Southern California regional round, was ready to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore to take on Santa Rosa in the quarterfinals.
“We’re prepped, we’re ready to go, we’re heading up … man, you know,” Mosley said. “I mean, everything you can imagine, all the emotions you can imagine from seeing it and literally tasting it, is all there. We had all that … and you know, again, we didn’t lose.”
He laughed at that last sentence. What else can you do?
The Netflix cameras captured all of it, and in the process they helped continue the transition of the “Last Chance U.” series. It began in 2016 and for its first four seasons followed two National Junior College Athletic Association football powers: East Mississippi for two seasons and Independence (Kan.) for the next two. The stories of the individual athletes should have been front and center, but they were overshadowed by the antics of two abrasive (and in some ways borderline abusive) coaches, East Mississippi’s Buddy Stephens and Independence’s Jason Brown.
Lately the producers have taken a different tack, going from small towns in flyover country to more urban environments in the California Community College Athletic Association. The most recent football series spotlighted Oakland’s Laney College and veteran coach John Beam during the 2019 season, and now they’ve opted for a slice of an even bigger city with the season that became available for streaming Wednesday morning.
And if it wasn’t already obvious, “Last Chance U.” has made it clear that the NJCAA programs and those in California are worlds apart.
“Being in Los Angeles it’s hard for us to keep our thumbs on the student-athletes day in and day out,” said ELAC athletic director and football coach Bobby Godinez. “After they leave campus they go home. They go to where they’re from. And you don’t know what they might be getting into, what they’re doing, and there’s always that level of concern for the element that they might run into.
“And so I think that nuance will show just a different part of community college. When you have a (NJCAA) college that has dorms and is in a small town, it’s basically 24-hour supervision. Not to say there’s not problems, which obviously we saw … you can have successes and failures in a small town. Well, in a big town like Los Angeles you’re going to have the same. It’s just different elements that’ll be involved.”
For instance, during the Laney football season, one of the players profiled was couch-surfing or sleeping in his car as the season progressed. He had a job, in addition to football and school, but was homeless.
It is a reminder that community college athletes – most of whom are there because of academics, or attitude, or because they are truly in need of that last chance – have some truly incredible back stories, largely because they either haven’t had things handed to them or have had them taken away.
Mosley, an ELAC alumnus who has been the school’s head basketball coach since 2013 (with a 189-50 record, eight playoff appearances and one trip to the CCCAA championship game), said that at first he was a little dubious about opening his program up to the cameras when the producers called.
“I knew about the show but hadn’t really watched it,” he said. “I went back and watched it and didn’t think that it was something that would fit my personality, and I didn’t really think I’d be that entertaining. Would anyone want to watch me or our basketball program?
“I just kind of thought about it and asked a few friends. My pastor and another good friend, they said, ‘Man, you have nothing to hide. And people need to see your story and hear your story and how you impact some of these kids’ lives.’ And so I decided to do it.”
From what we’ve been able to preview, Mosley does come across as compassionate but firm, and the gist of his challenge as a coach is probably distilled into one line to his team at halftime of a game his team should be winning handily but isn’t: “I got a reason to coach y’all now.” In other words, now maybe they’d start to pay attention.
The other concern would be that players might act out for the cameras, but the early indications seem to be that they’re acting, well, normally. As for Mosley, he said that as a man of faith he acts like someone’s always watching anyway, and “that holds me accountable.
“I’m gonna say what I say and do what I do,” he continued. “I’m gonna be honest. And I think the kids did the same. And what was interesting is you can still see it – you got all of the emotions of the kids, and I think all the kids had an opportunity to be in front of the camera. So it (wasn’t) where a kid was chasing the camera because everybody was in front of a camera every time. After a couple of times we saw the camera it became normal.
“They wanted to perform well. They wanted to look well, so I don’t think it affected us at all.”
The follow-up to this story is still to be determined. Nine of the 10 sophom*ores on last year’s roster moved on to the next level, Mosley said, and of those Malik Muhammed (Central Michigan) and Joe Hampton (Long Beach State) are receiving consistent minutes on the Division I level.
As for the ELAC program? Only a handful of community college programs are playing this spring, and Mosley’s isn’t one of them. Under those circ*mstances, maybe “Last Chance U.: Basketball” comes at the perfect time.
The directors’ view
A Q&A, via email, with “Last Chance U.” directors Adam Leibowitz and Daniel George McDonald:
Q: What is the process for determining which programs get selected for the show?
Adam Leibowitz: “It’s a matter of us doing our research on the most compelling programs across the country. The schools don’t necessarily have to be good but the potential for a successful season is always helpful. More than anything, we are looking for compelling characters and a good setup for the team’s arc. So for East L.A., they had an incredibly compelling coach who was very different from the other coaches we’ve followed on Last Chance U. And, despite their success under this coach, they had always come up short in their pursuit of the state championship. That seemed like a really great starting point for our story.”
Q: How many contenders were there for this particular season? Was the location – big city, west coast, etc. – important, or was that secondary to other factors? How, if at all, did the process change in transitioning from football to basketball? And how much does a program’s historic success matter?
Daniel George McDonald: “We have to find the right marriage of a program that we find interesting from a storytelling perspective, and a program that will have us and all of the things that come with having their campus invaded by a documentary film crew for months on end. The choice to transition from the rural schools highlighted in the first four seasons, to two urban programs with Laney and now East L.A., was a conscious one, but there really wasn’t much of a difference in our approach as we moved from football to basketball; we see our job as telling stories about people first and sports second, so the personalities involved are going to pique our interest more than anything to do with a particular sport. That said, all four of the schools featured on LCU have had radically different histories in terms of their sports success, and in each case we might think about: what kind of broad storytelling framework will their history enable, and how is this different from the stories that we’ve already told?”
Q: Have there been programs/coaches that you’ve been interested in using that have been reluctant to do so, from fear of distractions, players playing to the cameras, etc.?
Leibowitz: “The short answer to this is yes. We do our due diligence and reach out to a lot of schools when we’re developing these shows. And a lot of them are nervous to have their school and athletics program put under a microscope. But in a sense, the process is sort of self-selecting. When people are not comfortable being filmed it tends to show. And people that want their story told tend to be more compelling on camera.”
McDonald: “An interesting part of this is that I think Coach Mosley might have been as nervous as any of the coaches we’ve followed in regards to how our presence could impact his team, and yet might also be the least self-conscious on camera out of any of them.”
Q: Obviously no one could foresee the way the 2019-20 season would end. How much of an adjustment was required because of the sudden cancellation of the state tournament?
Leibowitz: “It was certainly shocking to us. Half of our crew was actually at the Tournament in Central California, prepping for the game that was supposed to take place the next day when it was called off. But a huge unexpected turn of events is something we’re used to dealing with as vérité documentarians. No one could have predicted how season 1 of Last Chance U would end (with a huge brawl) or how the finale of the Daytona Cheerleading Tournament would affect the end of “Cheer.” But unexpected twists in real life make for compelling twists on our shows.”
Q: Last, without giving anything away: Are there any breakout stars from these episodes, be it a player, teacher, counselor, parent, etc.?
McDonald: “I’m biased because I love all of the guys we spent time with this season, but there are a few that I suspect audiences will key on. The first is Joe Hampton, ELAC’s sixth man. Joe has an intense personality that can seesaw between extremes, but that’s tempered by a capacity for introspection and vulnerability that is, at times, really surprising. Another is Deshaun Highler, ELAC’s team captain. Deshaun has a magnetic personality (he’s electric to watch on the basketball court), but more than that, he, like Joe, lets you in and lets you experience his life and personality in an intimate way. But if I had to pick a “breakout star,” that would have to be Coach John Mosley. I think of myself as a cynic or as someone who is not easily impressed, but Mosley is the kind of person that makes me want to change my life and become a better person. He’s just an authentic, goodhearted man who gives of himself completely in order to help the kids in his program, and I think audiences are going to love him for that.”
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