By Rick Greenwald, director 
(February 2008)

When I first embarked on the mission to document the plight of the Cal Tech basketball team, my goals were very simple: tell an entertaining tale about the head coach of the world's most downtrodden basketball team and do it in under 10 minutes. What I did not expect to find is what I consider to be the single most unique college basketball experience in the country. The basic essence of the story, losing basketball games, has been unchanged for the last 50 years (Cal Tech basketball teams have been losing, and losing badly, since 1954). That is the hook, and it's a great one, but what I discovered was so incredibly deep that I realized the story could not, and should not, be told in a 10-minute short film.

These kids play basketball because they love it, and I believe it is one of the few places in American sports today where amateur athletics remains as pure as it was intended to be. Someone jokingly asked me if I thought Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, would be turning over in his grave if he knew what the Beavers were doing with his game. I did some checking on the origins of basketball and I am 100 percent certain that Mr. Naismith would cite Cal Tech basketball as the shining example of why he invented the game in the first place. It was meant to give students a break from their school work, and, at Caltech, what incredible school work they have to do. Repeated sleepless nights finishing physics problems might do wonders for the GPA but it's not the healthiest thing for the body and spirit. Roy Dow, the head coach, has said often that no school in the country needs a basketball team as much as Cal Tech needs theirs - despite the losing.

At the end of the day, as much as I was fascinated by the story, I always wondered if anybody would really care. What I was shocked to find is that not only were people entertained (the original goal), but they were quite moved and inspired by what they saw on screen. Several coaches approached me and said they would like a copy to use as a teaching tool. One woman even thanked me for making smart people look sexy. A few people who disliked sports, and certainly sports films, have been moved to tears by this story. All of this was quite relieving and very exciting.

Having David Duchovny come on board as narrator was the final validation. The initial instinct was to find a voice that could convey both humor and drama with equal credibility. The next goal was to find an iconic voice that ranked high on the "geek scale." David fit this category perfectly with his work on "The X-Files." What I didn't realize is that he has a great academic background, having studied at Princeton and Yale. To top it off, he played college basketball at Princeton. So I inexplicably found the only actor in Hollywood who had played college basketball, had gone to an elite academic institution, and was on a show that the Cal Tech community had, no doubt, embraced. Needless to say, it wasn't too difficult to convince David to lend his talents to Quantum Hoops.

As we move forward with distribution, I am proud to be the one to tell the story of the Caltech Beavers, not only to put a long-overdue spotlight on a school that whole-heartedly puts academics before athletics, but also to celebrate a remarkable group of young people who have the courage to face humiliation and defeat on a nightly basis and still have the desire to keep trying. Imagine what the world would be like if all of the great scientists gave up after failing at their first experiment? And maybe, just maybe, the planet would be better off if those same scientists had played a little basketball.

Photo credit Bob Paz
Click HERE for MPM's review of Quantum Hoops