Basketball State: A Film about Home and the Community of the Court

Gabe Hostetler’s film “Basketball State” will be premiering its first episode on October 20th at the Twin Cities Film Festival at Marcus West End Cinema in St. Louis Park, MN.

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“I want to tell a story about where I’m from. There’s all these stories about the big artists and the glitz and the glam in LA…

I’m like, I want to tell a story about Minnesota, about the place that I’m from.”

Nine years ago, Gabe Hostetler was ranked #1466 in the country according to MaxPreps. His drive to play the sport he loved was there when he played Tre Jones two years his junior in a high school matchup. It was there when, as he painfully remembers, Theo John and McKinley Wright threw down lob after lob in a fourth quarter comeback. It was there when the older Jones brother, Tyus, was in the stands for a local run.

That love for the game never stopped, but at some point it lapsed from the court to the camera.

In 2017, Gabe moved from Minnesota to Los Angeles to pursue film-making. It had been his second love after basketball since he was given a camera in the third grade. Despite his general success while in the city of stars, he regularly got in one argument:

“I’d tell people, I’m from Minnesota, and they’d be like ‘Minnesota? What’s out there? There’s nothing out there. Isn’t it freezing cold all year long?’” He laughed. “Not all year long, and it’s not just freezing cold. We have great basketball!”

For most, the two epicenters of American basketball are New York and Los Angeles. The cultural significance of the Knicks and Lakers (and the Nets and Clippers, I guess), even of the Liberty should not overshadow the importance of the individuals to come out of those cities. From current stars like Kawhi Leonard and DeMar DeRozan, to all-time legends like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bernard King, it’s safe to say those two cities have given so much to basketball.

Malcolm Emmons-Imagn Images

But, they’ve unfortunately taken a lot as well.

Other metropolitan areas like Chicago and Philadelphia have produced many talents as well, but it’s endemic of the same issue. Unless you’re one of the five most populous states or cities, no one’s going to know where to place you.

“A lot of people wouldn’t believe me, and then I’d start to list out these names… That’s when I truly realized how underrated we are.”

The film promises to focus not just on names but the people and histories that made them so important, even if that importance was to an intimate circle. There’s the obvious names like recent Minnehaha alumna, Jalen Suggs and Chet Holmgren, but there are also less well known players and stories.

John Autey / Pioneer Press

Stories like that of the Hill family, of three sisters, Taylor, Morgan, and Jade, took over Minnesota basketball, scoring over 2,500 points in their careers where most high school players never reach the four digit mark, will now get the attention they deserve. The Jones siblings will go from so revered they are separated from their humanity, to people who overcame odds to reach the league that millions, even billions, dream of but never reach. They will be seen as people again.

The project came together slowly over the past three years, requiring trips not only all over the country, but all over the world. Any project at that scale poses a huge challenge: How do you choose what to keep?

It became abundantly clear in our conversations that the only decision Gabe was struggling with was the amount of himself he should put into it. That is to say, as the editor, writer, producer, interviewer, and whatever other hats he wore, there was already a lot of himself in it. Thus, the question was if his story should be a beat instead of a background. After all, he isn’t a superstar like Lindsay Whalen. He’s not a part of the oft forgotten Hill family. He’s not one of the Jones brothers.

“It’s been kind of overwhelming, balancing that with ‘how do I I still make the project feel personal and connected to me?’ For a long time, I didn’t even have a personal connection piece. In the film, I just jumped right into ‘these are all these players from Minnesota, this is why they’re great, this is what they’ve accomplished’, but it didn’t have that personal touch to it.

It didn’t have that perspective.”

That seems to be the role of the filmmaker in documentaries. They exist to display their work like it is available at a museum gift shop to guide viewers through a series of sentence structures and auditory cues without existing beyond the ghost of their voice.

It’s that absence that gives documentaries their reputation as dusty chronologies. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the format and I can talk for hours about the impact ESPN’s 30 for 30s and Secret Base’s Dorktown have shaped my view of sports, but there is always the weight of a Ken Burns identity lurking in the background. Those sweeping shots and that monotone voice that are secluded in the world of BBC special presentations.

So, after rejecting the idea of divorcing narrator and person, Gabe switched his approach.

“I was speaking to my partner, and she was just like ‘you need to make this feel more personal’… and so that’s when I realized, what makes this (film) unique is this isn’t just some reporter from the outside telling the story of Minnesota. This is someone that grew up in that culture and knows these players personally and has built relationships.”

If there’s one thing that stood out from Gabe’s trailer and the three quarters of a million views it has gained, and even more so in our chat, it was the sincerity that washes through this piece. The approach and the effect, the frame and the focus, each and every aspect of this film is born from an intimate knowledge that only comes from living a story.

Minnesota sports gets called “grassroots” pretty often, especially in high school conversations. Every prep academy that woos top recruits with resources and promises of the NBA or WNBA calling gets to lean on the glitz and glamor of Florida, or California, or Texas’ supersized stadiums. Minnesota has none of these massive resource pools and yet, they continue to produce.

Prospect after prospect becomes player after player. Those players return to the state that grew them, and they mold those to come after them. In fact, the next face of the WNBA, waiting on the wings, is a Minnesota native.

In many ways, Paige Bueckers represents everything great about Minnesota basketball. It’s about creating a community and extending a hand, about grit and competition that comes in the shelter of a warm gym in a cold evening. Beyond any platitudes, it’s about people helping each other. That’s what grassroots means here.

According to Gabe, the very ground at the base of every gym, court, or mini-hoop in Minnesota rings out with one singular promise.

We are here. We’ve been here. We will be here.

Here in the Basketball State.

Matt Krohn-Imagn Images