Last Chance U and America’s all-or-noth­ing sport­ing dream

The sec­ond sea­son of Netflix’s Last Chance U returns to East Mis­sis­sip­pi Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege for a new aca­d­e­m­ic year. Their foot­ball pro­gramme takes on young ath­letes who pos­sess NFL-lev­el tal­ent, but are con­sid­ered ​‘red flags’ for var­i­ous rea­sons, and reha­bil­i­tates them for a sec­ond chance at the big state uni­ver­si­ties. The tug-of-war between com­pas­sion­ate aca­d­e­m­ic advis­er Brit­tany Wag­n­er and tough coach Bud Stephens con­tin­ues; but even though their pupils have changed, this sec­ond sea­son con­tin­ues to high­light the thin line between suc­cess and fail­ure in col­lege sports, and the impact this pres­sure has on young men bare­ly in their twenties.

“How do you know your dreams are going to be your dreams if you ain’t play­ing?” asks Isa­iah Wright, one of the more inter­est­ing sub­jects brought in front of the cam­era. For Wright and his team­mates, foot­ball is all that mat­ters, as it holds the key to a bet­ter life. How they play or per­form has a very direct impact on how the rest of their lives go – a few games stand between a life of fame, for­tune and pro­vid­ing for their fam­i­ly; or return­ing home with their dreams in tat­ters. It’s a star­tling fork in the road giv­en the young ages of the play­ers, whose self-worth is tied by them and oth­ers to their sport­ing form.

It is an inevitable prod­uct of when the busi­ness of sport in Amer­i­ca meets the busi­ness of edu­ca­tion. The top col­leges are the gate­way to pro­fes­sion­al sports, mak­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions from their pro­grammes and fill­ing sta­di­ums that house around 100,000 fans. For the pupils, a schol­ar­ship and sub­se­quent suc­cess at these insti­tu­tions offers the chance to be draft­ed to the major leagues, and the poten­tial eight fig­ure salaries that await first round draft picks.

It’s an entic­ing dream for the young men chas­ing it, and far too often acad­e­mia fig­ures nowhere in the equa­tion. A num­ber of reports have inves­ti­gat­ed the actu­al aca­d­e­m­ic pro­gres­sion stu­dent ath­letes receive, with many lag­ging behind with skills as basic as read­ing. On social media and in inter­views, ath­letes have often implied that the actu­al degree they are sup­posed to be study­ing for is viewed as a dis­trac­tion, an obsta­cle to be tol­er­at­ed while they wait for their real dream to be ful­filled. It’s an atti­tude Wag­n­er often wres­tles with while help­ing her stu­dents, remind­ing them of the impor­tance of their stud­ies. In the end, how­ev­er, the stu­dents have their mind on sport­ing and sub­se­quent finan­cial suc­cess, to the point where any oth­er prospect is not even con­sid­ered (sea­son one stu­dents are left agog when Wag­n­er tells them that garbage men make less than $100,000 a year).

So many of the cast of this series charge head­first towards a dream with a very slim suc­cess rate, with no back­up and the assump­tion that get­ting draft­ed will solve every­thing. Naïve, per­haps, but who can blame them? Foot­ball is what got them to where they are, in many cas­es com­ing from dif­fi­cult upbring­ings, while coach­es and col­lege recruiters telling them that foot­ball is what will move them ahead. ​“At that lev­el, peo­ple don’t care about you as peo­ple, as much as they do as foot­ball play­ers” Wag­n­er laments about the very top of the col­lege sport scene.

That car­rot of the NFL is so all-encom­pass­ing, so full of promise, and so fre­quent­ly dam­ag­ing. Those who do not make the cut leave with noth­ing, told that they can­not do the thing they love the most and that their futures lie else­where. It’s a sys­tem geared towards the gift­ed, with oppor­tu­ni­ties and under­stand­ing afford­ed only to those who show up on game day. Those who don’t, have the doors bru­tal­ly closed upon them. It’s all-or-noth­ing, and that pres­sure leads to the kind of dra­ma we see in the Net­flix series. East Mississippi’s play­ers find their form waver­ing due to the mas­sive stakes, while past mis­takes of indi­vid­ual play­ers prove hard to shake off when talk­ing to the big­ger colleges.

The chal­lenges of the path to star­dom have often been por­trayed on film and tele­vi­sion, with one exam­ple being the sem­i­nal doc­u­men­tary Hoop Dreams, about the chal­lenges fac­ing two African-Amer­i­can teenagers mov­ing to a pres­ti­gious high school to play bas­ket­ball. Social, finan­cial and racial issues put up bar­ri­ers to these young men before a shot has even been played. Film mak­er Nanette Burn­stein also shows sim­i­lar stress in her 2008 film Amer­i­can Teen, where mid­dle class high school­er Col­in Clemens sees his senior year bas­ket­ball sea­son as his only route to col­lege and away from the mil­i­tary. This goal is near­ly self-sab­o­taged when Clemens tries to do too much on the court, alien­at­ing him­self from his team mates.

“Nobody likes to see how the sausage is made” quips Stephens when explain­ing his own aggres­sive approach. While Last Chance U may not tell us any­thing we don’t already know about col­lege sport, see­ing the lim­bo faced by those who don’t make the cut makes for equal­ly uneasy viewing.