Football, small-town values draw TV crew to Montana
HIGHWOOD — On Aug. 27, a Los Angeles cable television crew finished a week of filming in central Montana for a documentary titled “The Rivals: Geraldine-Highwood.”
The half-hour long program is being produced for the Viceland television network and will be broadcast to a nationwide audience early next year as part of the “Vice World of Sports” cable series.
It’s the third time in little more than a decade that the lens of national media attention has focused on one or both of these small agricultural communities, and, more specifically, the Six-Man football team that helps to define them.
It started with an article written by Blaine Harden of the Washington Post about a football game that happened in Geraldine 13 years ago — the state championship tilt between the Geraldine Tigers and Custer-Melstone Cougars. The Tigers won that contest with a thrilling 80-78 overtime victory.
Then, three years ago, an independent film production company from Kalispell revisited the two schools. By that time, the Geraldine Tigers’ and the Highwood Mountaineers’ football teams had morphed into one.
Shrinking student enrollments had forced the two schools to co-op their football teams. For the cause of team unity, the two schools cast aside a decades-old tradition of community rivalry to become — who else? — the Geraldine-Highwood Rivals.
So what is it about these two small towns and their football team that would persuade storytellers from across the country to keep returning here? What is the compelling interest found in these communities strong enough to hold the attention of a national audience?
Prep Football: Geraldine-Highwood co-op a perfect fit
It begins with football and the concept of playing the nation’s most popular sport with only six players per side. That idea is still quite foreign to much of the country. Six-Man football is played in just 11 states and in a few portions of Canada.
Another attraction is the remote and, to a national audience, the largely unheard of section of Montana where the two towns lie.
“I don’t think a lot of people have really spent a lot of time in small communities, definitely not in Montana,” the show’s director, Andrew Cohn, said. “These are the type of towns you drive past on the highway and don’t necessarily take any time to visit unless you need gas. ‘Vice’s’ whole mantra is to take you to places you normally would never be, to shine a light on communities that otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to a larger audience.”
But these were only the hinge topics that the “Vice” film crew plans to use to tell a deeper, more nuanced story of dwindling small-town populations and to ask the question: What does America stand to lose if rural community values fade from the national consciousness?
“I think in Americans and, potentially in people worldwide, there’s been a loss of a sense of community,” said Alyonka Larionov, the “Vice World of Sports” producer in charge of the feature, “of the values of care, respect, hard work, and really looking into somebody’s eyes and connecting. I felt all of those qualities during my stay here, which I hope is what people will take away from this story.
“It’s a reminder of the question, ‘Who have we become?’ and that the people in these two communities probably have it right,” she said. “That to me is the story, and the subtext is football and how much these people care about each other.”
In telling their tale of football’s role in small-town America, the “Vice” production crew focused much of its attention on two players and their families, one from each town. Cody Kuhn and his family were selected to represent Geraldine; Louis Aron and his family represent Highwood.
“The differences between the two boys we identified is: one boy really wants to get out,” Larionov said. “He really wants to leave, and the other couldn’t imagine leaving home because he loves it here so much.”
The documentary also spends a considerable amount of time highlighting the influence of coach Rodney Tweet and the admiration both the players and the communities they come from feel for the veteran coach.
Larionov compared Tweet, who is in his 36th year as a high school football coach, to some legendary mentors in major league sports.
“I would put (coach Tweet) in the class of somebody like a Phil Jackson (NBA) or a Scotty Bowman (NHL), because (when) you observe somebody like that, it’s not that they demand respect, it’s just given,” she said. “And it’s given because of the way he treats his players.
“All I kept hearing over the week we’ve been here is that he includes everybody. He looks you in the eye. He has conversations with you. He knows your family. He cares about the community. And when you see that someone cares that deeply, the only natural reaction is to care as much. These kids buy into his system of wanting to do the best that they can for him, and that’s why he’s been so successful.”
“The Rivals: Geraldine-Highwood” also attempts to put the loss of population in Montana’s agricultural communities into a broader context. The finished production will touch upon diverse topics, including the continuing consolidation of farmland ownership, the impact federal programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program have had on shrinking rural populations, and the difficult decisions faced by young people choosing to either leave their hometowns or remain despite the reality of contracting career opportunities.
It’s a lot to try to stuff into a 30-minute production format. The limitation is not lost upon the show’s director.
“It’s a unique challenge to tell such a complex and rich story in half an hour,” Cohn said. “All the time I’ve been doing this story, I’ve wished it could be a longer piece because there is so much complexity and great characters and great story lines.”
The “Vice” crew also acknowledged the need to exert a light touch in production, wishing to avoid “cramming” any conclusions about the challenges faced by rural communities down their viewers’ throats.
“We wouldn’t be doing this story justice if we came to a place with a predisposition,” Larionov said. “We have to come in with an open mind and to give the community or the people or the sport the platform to tell a story that is authentic and real.”
Still, Larionov did not flinch from drawing personal comparisons with her life growing up in Detroit followed by developing a career in Los Angeles, and her week’s experience of life in Highwood and Geraldine.
“I’ve come from these big cities. That’s all I’ve really known,” she said. “And I’ve been blown away by these very simple values, which are so important and such a foundation of who we are as people.”
“If you think about the basic needs of a human, the idea of surviving, you need to depend on your community,” Larionov added. “That’s not how it is in the urban cities anymore. I don’t even know my neighbor. To me that’s the question. How did we lose what really works?”
“The Rivals: Geraldine-Highwood” is scheduled to broadcast on Viceland Network television in either January or February.