Sports odds and ends by Charles Hallman
The Minneapolis North High School football team won a championship in a year around school closures due to the Covid pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the resulting civil unrest and protesting.
The Polars is a predominantly Black football team in a predominantly Black neighborhood in a city that historically has a strained relationship between the Black citizenry and the city police. And ironically, all the North football coaches are policemen.
Local filmmaker Jeffrey Williams is a Northsider who also teaches at a Northside school. A graduate of Colgate University and Howard University School of Communication, where he earned an MFA in film, Williams’ previous cinematic work includes “For Dinner,” “5ive Man Confession” and “Check It Up – To Whom It May Concern.”
His latest “Force of Blue” is Williams’ first documentary and feature film that he has directed. The film was part of the 26-film agenda at this year’s Twin Cities Black Film Festival in October. It has made its rounds at several film festivals around the country.
Its website noted, “Force of Blue is a social analysis, from an athletic lens, of a very unique time period in our nation’s history. The North High Polars…tackled a season for the ages.”
The director’s goal was to show “just how compelling [is] a group of young men,” Williams told the TCBFF audience after “Force of Blue” was shown. He spent the entire 2020 season following the North football team.
“We started in September [2020] right at the beginning of the fall season,” noted Williams. “That year they didn’t know if they’re going to have a season in the fall because of Covid.
“We followed them all the way through [the season]. It took about four or five months to shoot it. I never really had any budget… It was wonderful having a front row seat through this prism, just how the coach and his staff were harnessing these young men,” explained Williams.
Any comparison to the four-part “Boys in Blue” documentary about the North football team that aired on Showtime is purely coincidental. Williams’ doc is about the 2020 football season while Peter Berg’s focused on the 2021 campaign.
Furthermore, both films uniquely examined the player-coach relationship in the post-George Floyd world between Black youth and their Black coaches whose day jobs were in law enforcement.
“I just followed them to see how they respond to playing with their head coach being a police officer, and then I didn’t realize they had as many police officers on [the staff]. They also have two or three guys who were working in the prison system.”
“I wanted to show a realistic viewpoint of how these kids were at North High School [and] how the coaches related [to the players],” said Williams. “They didn’t really pay attention to the camera.”
The football action culminated in a season-ending championship for North High. But more importantly, observed Williams on “Force of Blue”: “It’s not about policing. It’s more about humanity.”
Charles Hallman welcomes reader comments to challman@spokesman-recorder.com.